Mary Earps has seized the moment to establish herself as England No 1

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Rumour has it that the country’s workforce is preparing to invoice the FA for the number of working hours lost to watching clips of Mary Earps when they should have been doing other things. Between them, Alessia Russo and her Manchester United team-mate will have accounted for a good chunk of the nation’s screen time over the past month, behind only the search for final tickets: at one point, BBC Sport’s Twitter clip of Russo’s backheel was being viewed 17 times a second. One could easily lose hours to watching Earps leap and spin with the trajectory of a Catherine wheel, soundtracked appropriately by a descending whistle of disbelief right before the explosion.

You would not say that Earps, as a person, has a taste for the theatrical — she is far too measured in both manner and speech — but it has helped no end that the saves in question are the kind of thing the actor who plays her in the movie of all this might end up calling on a stunt double for. It will be no minor role, either, considering the importance of some of them. “Ping!” whistles the ball 20 seconds into England’s win over Sweden, cannoning off a splayed left foot as though slapped by a pinball flipper. Later, her spine unbends and a curled palm seems to grow extra digits to deny Stina Blackstenius. Thunk! Zap! Kaboom! Off she goes, arms slashing the air in an onomatopoeic frenzy.

Earps makes a save against Sweden (Photo: Jonathan Moscrop/Getty Images)

On the evidence of the past few weeks, it is hard to imagine her being dislodged as England No 1 for some time, although Earps knows from her own experiences that fortunes change wildly. Had Euro 2022 retained its original starting date, she wouldn’t have had this summer, not least because of the surgery that ruled her out of the Olympics. The Athletic understands that she would otherwise have been called up for Team GB.

Ellie Roebuck’s role as a travelling player in the 2019 World Cup squad, purely to get experience, seemed to confirm the suspicion that she was being groomed to be England’s No 1, and most came away from the 2020 FA Cup final with the feeling that Roebuck or Everton’s Sandy MacIver would be jostling for the international starting berth for the home Euros. The ascension of Hannah Hampton, first at Birmingham and then at Aston Villa, seemed to put further daylight between Earps and a national team role. Earps made the 2019 World Cup squad but did not feature, with Karen Bardsley playing four times in that tournament and Carly Telford three.

Earps has doubtless been aided by the misfortunes of Roebuck, whose calf injury meant that she played just 10 times for Manchester City last season, and MacIver, whose stock fell with an Everton team that dramatically underachieved. Earps has said since that she feared international football may have passed her by, and for a time her England career did seem stuck between stations, even if those close to her insist in retrospect that she was never far away.

And they were right. Of the 11 who started England’s World Cup quarter-final against Norway three years ago, less than half have started at this tournament. Six of the 12 subs did not make Sarina Wiegman’s squad. With Bardsley retiring and Telford’s role at Chelsea becoming increasingly peripheral, the goalkeeping position was the least certain.

The only question was whether Earps, eight years older than Hampton, seven years older than Roebuck and five years older than MacIver, was too old, about to be supplanted by the generation who had only ever known full-time football. It seems a ludicrous statement to make of a 29-year-old but Earps is six years younger than Telford and eight years younger than Bardsley — bang in the middle, stuck in some awkward, liminal space, bookended by the incoming and the outgoing.

Earps is one of the last Lionesses who will be able to recall days spent straddling that realm between professional and amateur. She spent the evening before her Doncaster Rovers debut working a shift that finished at 11pm at her local cinema, and also worked in a toy shop. Yet she benefited, too, from opportunities denied those who came before.

Earps stops a shot against Austria (Photo: FRANCK FIFE/AFP via Getty Images)

It is wrong to burden this summer’s players with holding up the game’s legitimacy, but if Earps has dispelled some of the misconceptions around women goalkeepers it is due in part to the fact that she was one of the few to receive position-specific coaching early. From the age of 14, she trained with the England goalkeeper Leanne Hall at Leicester. By contrast, the former Manchester United goalkeeper Siobhan Chamberlain met her first goalkeeper coach when she joined up with England, by which point she was in her early twenties.

There were other influences, too. From the age of 14, Earps played in her father’s five-a-side teams, one of which comprised ex-pros including the European Cup winner Bryn Gunn. She would join them for the obligatory beers afterwards — she would have a Coke — and perhaps she owes some of that coolness to those days. “It just gave me a chance to get on the ball and practise having the ball under pressure,” Earps told me in 2019, of those matches when she would play outfield, “because when there’s a six-foot, 15-stone bloke running at you, you want to make sure you move the ball pretty quickly. It gave me a different dimension to my training.”

She accrued her own Champions League experience with Bristol, and with it came a new aspiration. Bristol endured a 12-0 aggregate defeat by three-times winners FA Frankfurt and Earps would later recall how the line of BMWs in the German side’s car park provided an indication of how far ahead the women’s game was elsewhere in Europe.

“They will go for blood,” she told me four years on. “It was something about that game. I just loved it. It was just like: ‘I want to be a part of something like this. I want to be playing for the best.’ My parents came over to watch the second leg, which was in Frankfurt, and I had a drink with them after the game. And my dad and my mum said that I had a lightbulb moment, where I’ve just received something and gone: ‘This is what I want.'”

Earps’ eventual move to Wolfsburg, after three successful seasons at Reading (Earps made the WSL team of the year in 2016-17 and kept the most clean sheets in the league the following season), did not surprise her parents.

Earps during her time at Wolfsburg (Photo: Thomas Niedermueller/Bongarts/Getty Images)

Wolfsburg was the quasi-halfway house that made Earps the goalkeeper who would touch greatness at the Euros. Standards were so strict that one player earned a punctuality fine for being trapped in a broken lift. More crucial was the time devoted to working on Earps’ explosiveness — in other words, how quickly and how assuredly she could spring from one side of the goal to the other. Compared to men, women goalkeepers may need to take additional steps before launching into a save; coaches can hone a players’ footwork and power to help not only with a goalkeeper’s leap but the power in saves made with the legs.

It explains why Earps has been able to cover such impossible distances at this tournament, where she is in the best form of her career. This summer, Earps has served her highest level of technical performance and exhibited her best decision-making, all under the most pressure of her career. The data backs up that she has been one of the best shotstoppers in the Euros. Looking at ‘goals prevented’, which compares how many goals a goalkeeper is expected to have conceded based on the quality of the shots on target they have faced (xGOT) and how many they actually conceded. The higher the goals prevented number, the better the shot-stopping performance, and only Belgium’s Nicky Evrard has prevented more than Earps at Euro 2022.

Now, in the words of one source involved in football marketing, she is a mainstream sports personality who played every WSL minute for Manchester United last season, keeping 10 clean sheets.

To say that she has waited for this is an understatement, and in a world where there is so much pressure on young people to have everything figured out yesterday, Earps’ understated, steady resolve is a reminder that there is often more time than we think; that one’s moment in the sun does not have to be instant nor constant to be worthwhile or fulfilling. Who would have forecast a boom like this for Earps, ahead of Roebuck and MacIver, two years ago? Truly, everyone rides their own timeline.

In some ways, all this is reflective of her own quiet, measured ways. Earps recalled how, on those evenings spent playing five-a-side, some of those ex-pros could plant themselves on the halfway line and still rule the show with their touch, vision, class. “And I guess that was another lesson,” she said. “You don’t have to be the loudest, the fastest. You don’t have to be running around like a headless chicken or trying so hard to make an impact. You can do it just by being the player that you are.”

At last, Earps has her international moment, and she has done it by being herself. But maybe she didn’t even know that she would turn out to be so compulsively box-office: soaring through the Sheffield sky like a comet, glittering and shimmering and drenched in gold.

(Photo: Catherine Ivill – UEFA/UEFA via Getty Images)