Leah Williamson rarely fails to find the right words to fit the occasion.
Yet, after the news broke that the England captain had ruptured her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) just three months before the World Cup, she largely held them back. The only exception to that was an Instagram post published in the immediate aftermath of the injury where she explained: “Until I have the words to express my feeling properly I will struggle to verbalise them. The noise around the situation is loud and I need some quiet to let it all sink in.”
The noise around players missing a major tournament has rarely been louder than it has been this summer. That’s because the list of top players missing the Women’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand through injury reads like a who’s who of global women’s football.
Before the tournament even started England knew they would be missing Williamson, Beth Mead — player of the tournament at last year’s European Championship — and Fran Kirby. The Netherlands were without Vivianne Miedema. The USA were missing Mallory Swanson, Sam Mewis, Catarina Macario and captain Becky Sauerbrunn. Janine Beckie was out for Canada. Katie Rood for New Zealand. Giulia Gwinn was missing for Germany. Marie-Antoinette Katoto and Delphine Cascarino were out for France.
GO DEEPER
Vivianne Miedema on World Cup injuries: ‘I’ve had to turn off the TV. It’s too painful’
Once the “X player out of the World Cup” headlines are written, the media’s focus turns to what it means for the team. Which players will step up?
The injured player becomes little more than an aside. An asterisk to the main story.
For the most part, that suits them just fine. While the eyes of the world are fixed elsewhere, they are given space to absorb their new reality: that the very thing they have spent years working towards, dreaming about, visualising, has gone.
“The whole thing was just hell, if I’m honest,” says former Manchester City, Lyon and Everton midfielder Izzy Christiansen. She’s recalling her experiences in 2019, when she suffered an ankle injury during England’s final game of the SheBelieves Cup in Florida, just 65 days before then-Lionesses manager Phil Neville was to name his final squad for the World Cup in France that summer.
“I was about to shoot, and as I planted my foot I felt a tackle come from behind me. I felt a twist and a crack in my leg and I knew something bad had happened.”
The game against Japan was being played in an NFL stadium with an on-site X-ray machine, so while her team-mates continued to record a statement victory that confirmed them as SheBelieves champions for the first time, Christiansen was discovering her fate: a spiral fracture of her fibula.
A broken leg.
England’s medical staff gave her a timescale for recovery, within which there was a “slim chance” she could be ready for the World Cup. Allied to Neville’s public description of her as a “vital” member of his squad, Christiansen focused all of her energies on making that slim chance a reality.
It was during this game against Japan in 2019 that Christiansen suffered the injury that would keep her out of the World Cup (Photo: Action Foto Sport/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
The Football Association decided it would be best for Christiansen to stay in the UK and conduct her rehab at St George’s Park (as opposed to returning to France and her club side, Lyon). For two months she followed an intense programme at England’s somewhat isolated training base. Mind-numbing hours were spent attached to machines that promised to speed up bone healing. She kept her cardiovascular fitness up with runs on an anti-gravity treadmill and rebuilt her wasted leg muscles with slow, deliberate, single-leg exercises.
As the squad announcement got closer, Christiansen started ticking off milestones.
“Then it was like: am I or am I not OK? I remember doing one particular pitch rehab session where I was asked to hit a still ball into the goal. It was basically like a penalty kick, but into an empty goal on a rehab pitch. That was the final exercise of that rehab day. And I just remember thinking: if this was the World Cup final, would I be OK?
“And I knew in my head, it wasn’t right. I knew I wasn’t confident. I knew I wasn’t planting my foot correctly. I knew I wasn’t striking through the ball properly. Because I was in fear of it re-cracking. I kind of knew at that point…”
Even so, when the email came confirming she hadn’t made the squad, Christiansen was devastated. She turned her phone off for three days, not wanting to speak to anyone.
“I think the reason I was so upset was because of the process to really push limits and boundaries (in the rehab process), and then still come up short,” she adds. “And the FA did it all with me. So I kind of thought, ‘Well, why would they be doing this with me if they weren’t going to take me?’. I could have been at my club.
“The hardest thing is when it’s close. If you have an injury that’s a nailed-on, nine-to-12-month injury, obviously it’s horrible, but you can also get your head around the fact it’s absolutely impossible you’re going to make the tournament. But it was the fact there was a chance that was difficult. And in hindsight, it was difficult being at St George’s Park for that length of time for me not to make it anyway.
“It was the lowest point of my career. I’ll never forget it.”
Once the noise over her omission had quietened, Christiansen started getting approaches to do media work during the tournament. Her initial response was a hard “no”. A few weeks later, they tried again.
“I was thinking, ‘I don’t really want to be part of the tournament. I just want to curl up in a ball and not watch’.”
Eventually she was persuaded, and looks back on the experience as a formative one, given her considerable rise in the broadcasting ranks since then (and her ambition to progress even further since announcing her retirement from playing last month).
It was not an easy one, however.
“I was commentating on the semi-final between England and the USA. It was weird because I had these split feelings of anger and disappointment with the staff that the process I’d been through had exhausted me and there was no reward at the end of it. And then I also had these other emotions of wanting my team to be successful. So it was a horrible place to be, mentally.”
In an interview last year, Arsenal and England striker Mead revealed she’d had similar feelings after she was left out of the squad selected to represent Team GB at the 2020 Olympics. In this case it wasn’t injury keeping her out, but the decision of temporary manager Hege Riise to leave her behind, but the tumult of emotions that followed resonate with Christiansen.
“I hated the thoughts I was having while the Olympics were being played,” Mead told FourFourTwo. “I wanted the girls to do well, but I also didn’t, because of Hege. I found myself thinking thoughts I never thought I would.”
Christiansen recalls Mead getting “quite negative press” for her comments. “But she’s just saying what people who have been in that situation before are thinking as well. I don’t think anyone will ever understand on the outside how that feels on the inside.”
Sports psychologist Sarah Murray has worked with elite female athletes including professional footballers and says the mixture of emotions is completely normal when players miss a major tournament through injury.
“When you consider the emotional tie that players have to their sport, and the piece of it that is entwined in their identity, to then miss out on what they might view to be the defining moment of their career so far… When you get that news as a player, my experience working with footballers has been that it is crushing,” says Murray. “It’s devastating. For some, there’s a grieving period. And what we know about the stages of grief is that they don’t come in a particular order.”
She says Christiansen’s initial desire to ignore the tournament completely is a common part of a “denial piece”.
“If I ignore the World Cup and just don’t talk about it, I’m sort of denying that this has ever happened. And that I’m not going to be part of it.”
At some point, however, Murray says the player might reach a point of acceptance; accepting that they’re not going to be part of the tournament in the way they wanted, but that they can still add value by being there in some way.
“There will still be times — moments of every day, or perhaps every week, depending on the player — when they have that sense of anger or denial or low mood regarding it. And then they pop back out of that and they’re accepting of it and enjoying the responsibilities. And then something might happen and they might spend 10 minutes back in that anger piece or low mood. It really is a very personal journey that on some level, all the players will go through.”
How players handle the initial devastation of realising their hopes of competing at a major tournament are over is very individual, says Murray. Factors such as having a strong support network of family and friends and the backing of their club and/or national team can give players the opportunity to move through the stages of grief slightly quicker and mean they get to the stage of rationalisation before those who do not have as much access to such support.
“Rationalisation”, explains Murray, is the ability to put things into perspective. To understand that “life continues. That actually, it won’t define their journey as a player. That the value of any footballer goes way beyond the badge they wear. And once we can move to a stage of recognising that, then the player tends to view it with a far healthier, broader perspective, rather than it being the more traditional initial impact of ‘it’s the end of the world’.
“If somebody’s whole identity is totally entwined in being a footballer, it’s going to take longer to rationalise that life continues.”
When a tournament-ending injury occurs to a player whose name is among the first on the team sheet, it sparks a cacophony of noise. The player is headline news, their social media flooded with messages of commiseration and support. For some, the noise is just too loud.
“I turned off my phone — social media and everything — for three weeks,” says Aston Villa’s French midfielder Kenza Dali. In 2019, she was less than a month away from representing her country in a home World Cup when a freak accident left her with a broken toe and shattered dreams.
“It was the worst time of my career because I came back from an ACL; two surgeries and two years of working hard for this World Cup. To be back in the team was a massive thing because the competition is really high and not playing for two years and coming back at the best level is already an achievement. Then three weeks before the World Cup, I dropped an iron on my toes.”
It happened as a result of a reflex reaction that surely belongs only to footballers. When Dali dropped a heavy iron, instead of letting it fall to the floor or using her hands, she instinctively put out her foot to “catch it”.
“Because I’ve always played football the first thing I have is not hands, it’s feet,” she says. “So I just wanted to catch it. I don’t know why. I can’t explain that.”
Dali’s foot was painful but it wasn’t until a doctor insisted on X-raying it that she realised just how much damage had been done.
“I remember the doctor dropped my phone in the X-ray room and I was making a joke: ‘Hey, be careful because if you break my phone, you pay for it’. And then he answered back, ‘Oh, I hope your phone is not broken like your feet’.”
Dali was in disbelief. She sat there for 10 minutes telling the doctor he was wrong. That it was just painful. Not broken. Eventually, the reality sunk in. Three weeks out from the World Cup, she had broken her foot.
She didn’t give up. Nike made her special boots to try to protect the break. She even tried putting raw chicken in her boots — something Patrice Evra revealed had worked for him when he was playing for Monaco.
“I tried this. It was awful. During two weeks we tried everything with the doctor. But when it is broken it is broken. That was it.”
Being in France where the World Cup was being held added another layer to the complex psychological experience of missing out on a major tournament. “You turn on the TV and all you see is the national team. You’re driving on the motorway, it’s the national team (on advertising), you go to the grocery store and you see the sponsors. Everywhere you go it’s all connected to the World Cup.”
Dali initially chose to block out the external noise (as much as possible) by turning off her phone. But as with Christiansen, she was eventually persuaded by a broadcaster to add her expertise to their coverage of the tournament. “I said no in the first place. And then I was like, ‘You know what? Sometimes you need to face your troubles’. So I started to watch the games, but it was really difficult.”
(Photo: Catherine Steenkeste/Getty Images)
Quietening the noise around themselves by turning off phones as Dali and Christiansen did can be a key part of the process for players coming to terms with missing a major tournament, says Murray.
“It gives them time to start to move through the process of what is often a very irrational and natural emotional response to a place where they feel a bit more comfortable and they’re able to handle the mental consequences of something that would have been incredibly upsetting in its initial realisation.”
Murray’s philosophy as a sports psychologist is generally not to give advice to players she works with but instead to simply listen to how they’re feeling. “It’s about allowing them to accept and figure out what is going on for them and really acknowledging that, however they feel, they own their feelings. There isn’t a right or wrong way to respond to this. It’s really just how you’re responding. Then we can talk through things to help them to move through it and understand why they feel as they do and understand what might be helpful for them right now.”
Having been there, Dali, who, after a stellar season with her club is in the France squad for this tournament, offers her own view on how the lengthy list of absentees from the World Cup can try to deal with their absence.
“Do it your way,” she says. “Listen to yourself. Nobody is in your situation, your body, your head. Just do what’s best for you. If it’s to completely switch off and don’t watch any games, do it. If you want to be closer to the team and be a part (of it) in a certain way, do it. But don’t force anything. Do what makes you the happiest possible.
“Everyone is different (when) facing troubles. Some things work for some people and don’t work for others. Just accept the person you are and what makes you happy.”
While the eyes of the world focus on Australia and New Zealand, there are a squad of world-class players looking on (or not, as the case may be) from the sidelines. We lament their absence almost as much as they will.
(Top photos: Getty Images; design: Eamonn Dalton)
