“I feel like some people have the expectation of you to be as good as you were when you left it,” says Beth Mead, pondering her return from close to a year out with an ACL injury. The forward was back with England in December and scored the team’s fourth goal in a 6-0 defeat of Scotland that was not quite enough to earn a place in the Nations League finals and Olympic qualification for Team GB.
Now she is further along on her journey to being back at her “Euro level”, but is not there yet. The next step will be two England friendlies in Marbella against Austria and Italy.
“You always try as be close to your best,” says the forward at the team hotel in the Spanish coastal city. “I’ve started to feel really good again. I had a few performances where I wasn’t happy for Arsenal but I feel like I’m getting into a good swing. I started the new year trying to get back to my Euro 2022 level and knowing what I can do as a player. I’m always building, I’m always learning, I’m always trying to develop. It’s a slow process, especially after such a long injury. I do feel good. I’m getting regular game time at the club and I’ve very much got a new excitement on the pitch again.”
However, making your body do what your brain tells it can be a frustrating disconnect on the road back to being your best. “I would say I’ve done OK in that process, bearing in mind my first training session with the team was seven or eight months after the injury and I still took a couple of months [to get back] from there. I felt the difference of even a passing drill, of being on my toes or being on the back foot to then come out and play a better ball out.
“Little things that are your bread and butter, it is like riding a bike, you get better eventually, but you do get frustrated about things that you used to do in your sleep. You do notice because it’s stuff that you would do day in and day out.”
Anterior cruciate ligament injuries have always existed within the women’s game, but the volume of professional players suffering them is an increasing concern. In the last two days alone, Chelsea’s Mia Fishel and Birmingham’s Jamie Finn have sustained the knee injury, which involves at least nine months out.
Last year Mead and Vivianne Miedema, her partner and Arsenal teammate, took part in an Arsenal documentary which tracked their recovery journeys and discussed the multifaceted causes. Asked whether Fifa or Uefa reached out to discuss their experiences, Mead says: “There is a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes which is great. Me and Viv are going to be taking part in stuff with Fifa and a little bit more, they’re speaking to people who have done their ACLs and how they feel about it.
“You look at the likes of Keira [Walsh] in the World Cup, panicking and thinking the worst because of what’s happening in the game. It’s frustrating to see, us sat watching from home. There were a few ACL injuries in the World Cup and there’s been quite a few this season. We brought our documentary out to bring it to light a little bit better. Off the back of that, we’ve linked up with a few more [people] so hopefully we can get a little bit more data put out there and more specific information.”
Does Mead feel a responsibility to help football understand why there are so many ACL injuries in the women’s game? “That’s the goal, I think it’s the million-dollar question,” she says. “Someone is going to get very rich if they figure out how to stop these injuries. We sat down with people who specialise in certain fields and we could have talked for hours about certain things but there’s no definitive answer of how to stop them and I think that’s the frustrating part.
“We do feel the responsibility. There’s a lot of us that have power in a good way to try and help and push on and help with the research. It’s funny how much knowledge you actually get throughout it, I feel like I’m a physio these days but I’m clearly not.”
