Lucy Bronze

It strikes me that Lucy Bronze is, clearly and obviously, one of the greatest sportspeople in British history.

As much as it is extremely pleasing that Chloe Kelly learnt her magnificent technique on the mean streets of Ealing, most of my emotions at the end of Sunday's game were attached to Bronze, who is a quite remarkable person.

Lucia Roberta Tough Bronze - you couldn't make up a name like that. Somehow each word in it tells a story.

Let's start with the football. The scale of Bronze's accomplishment has no comparison in British football.

She was won nine league titles (with five different clubs), five Champions Leagues, two major international tournaments whilst runner-up in another, she was been in the FIFA World XI 7 times, she has been the best (or second best) player in a World Cup (2019), been judged the FIFA Best Player in the World.

No one else in Britain has a record, as an individual and as a team-member, like that - the closest is Bobby Charlton, who won the league three times, the European Cup once, the World Cup, won the Ballon d'Or (and was nominated several more times.)

That is across all of men's and women's football. That's the bare bones of it. There have been more brilliant players, perhaps, whether it's Kelly Smith or Lauren Hemp, Bale or Best, but no one else has won so much nor been judged, so regularly, so close to the top of the game.

Although not a genius of football like Aitana Bonmati, it is also not right to see Bronze just in terms of character and application. At her best, as in the 2019 World Cup, she was a joke, just the best player on any pitch she was on, a computer game character picking the ball up at one end of the pitch and running past everyone else to the other end before pinging a cross in. Injuries have meant she's a little past that now, but still, her athleticism, nous, strength, will, technique, made her one of the best players of the 2025 tournament. England would not have won without her - certainly not the quarter-final vs Sweden, where her goal and penalty were the key moments in the game.

So, those are things people will remember of her from the 2025 tournament. Oh yes, that, and strapping up her own leg on the pitch like a medical pro. Oh yes, and the fact she revealed at the end she'd played the whole tournament with a broken tibia.

Look, I've broken a tibia, and while I can safely assume her tibia was not broken like the great schism of my broken tibia, we can also say that that's pretty ... impressive.

And in character. There's a lot of detail to Lucy Bronze. She can speak four languages. Her father is Portuguese, her mother from Northumberland - she grew up mainly on Holy Island, also Alnwick, but also spent time in Faro - a good combo. When she was young, she was also county champion in cross-country. hockey and tennis. She might have been an 800m runner. She also won awards in maths. In 2013, at university, she wrote her dissertation on ACL injuries on women's sport, which is probably one of the most important issues in all of women's football. At the 2023 World Cup, she won everyone's eternal respect by refusing to shake the hand of football's grotesque head honcho Gianni Infantino, after some entirely typical remarks he made about women's football.

She recently revealed that she is autistic and has ADHD. Years ago, I remember speaking with my wife about people in sport with autism, wondering if many of the qualities associated with autism might lend themselves very well to high achievement in some sports. When we looked it up at the time (probably around 2012) we found that there were basically no high-level sportspeople who were openly autistic.

In the last decade or so, the dialogue and understanding on ASD and ADHD has changed a fair bit, but still, for one of the top sportspeople in the world, who is known for being very protective of their personal life, to speak up, was, I think, pretty powerful and groundbreaking.

In her initial interview, there was huge insight into how someone neurodiverse, or even just someone who struggles socially, might attempt, and succeed, to integrate into the often extremely intimidating and baffling world of team sports.

I mean, imagine how important that is, or can be ...

Anyway, that's all, really. I think Lucy Bronze is the hero a lot of young people need.