“Last night, we were walking round the pitch and there’s the player of the match sign as you walk out. I said: ‘Have a look at that, kid, because that will be you tomorrow night,’” says Rachel Daly, after England’s dazzling 6-1 defeat of China on Tuesday confirmed passage to the last 16 of the World Cup at the top of Group D.
Who was walking with her? Does that question even need asking? It was Lauren James, the new jewel in the crown of Sarina Wiegman’s Lionesses. About 24 hours later, James would be clutching her second player of the match trophy in two games, having bagged two goals and three assists against China, denied a World Cup hat-trick only by a controversial VAR decision.
“That’s how much we back her – she is unbelievable,” Daly says. “She is growing and growing and the most important thing is we keep around her. She is a young player and she’s learning every day. She can pick up little bits from the older players, but she is LJ and she’s brilliant.”
There has been almost 10 years of gradually building noise about the phenomenal talent being nurtured in the form of James. On Tuesday, the rolling thunder reached Adelaide’s Hindmarsh Stadium and lightning struck. Over and over. James is the bolt that England’s injury-hit campaign needed and with every touch, every effortless slalom through a sea of red shirts, you could feel confidence swell through the team.
James’s journey to the top was inevitable, but it has not been straightforward. As a child, she would play football most days with her brothers Reece (the Chelsea and England defender) and Josh. Their progress was nurtured by their father, Nigel, a football coach who runs his own academy. Lauren would be in tow when Reece began playing for Kew Park Rangers and Epsom Eagles, kicking a ball on the sidelines and playing with other siblings before joining Epsom. From the age of six she trained with Chelsea, then signed for Arsenal at 13.
“She was too good to train with the Arsenal girls when she first went there,” Nigel told the Beautiful Game Podcast . “So Arsenal tried something. Pedro [Martínez Losa], who was the coach at the time, brought her in to train with the women.
“It was all good hearing it, but your 14-year-old daughter is now training with women who are 35, 28 – they were grown women. When you are on the pitch it is football, but off the pitch they had nothing in common. What people would see is this little girl. Some could take it and put their arm around her. Some couldn’t take it and said: ‘You shouldn’t be here. You should be at school.’”
Arsenal struggled to find a place for James. A layer of the senior players did not want her around but she was too good for the girls’ academy teams, so she trained in the boys’ academy. That hadn’t happened before and despite its success she was told to return to playing with the girls.
It didn’t help that James is quiet and unassuming. As her former manager at Manchester United, Casey Stoney, put it in her column for the Times: “She has a laid-back personality, but it went against her in her early years. People wondered: ‘Does she want it enough? Is she going to work hard enough?’”
The problem was that her talent was so far ahead of her age. And although an amateur game was turning increasingly professional, it was not yet equipped to understand the developing teenage brain and body, let alone provide an elite academy environment.
James was 16 when she was poached by Stoney for the newly formed Manchester United team in 2018. Technically, she was ready for the first team but she was still developing physically, mentally and emotionally.
“I learned so much about the brain and how the frontal lobe develops, which is responsible for things like your emotions, problem solving and social interaction,” Stoney wrote in the Times. “It was about how psychologically we could support her and how we could push her. At the same time, I needed to be her constant, because she was away from home.”
James was shielded from the spotlight, each interview request rebuffed. United gave her first-team football but it was inevitable that once her age and development started to catch up with her skill the giants would swoop and Chelsea brought her back to London for a fee of about £200,000, including bonuses, in 2021.
Emma Hayes, like Stoney, has been careful to ease James in, allowing her to continue to develop into a young adult and reap the long-term rewards of a mature player. Hayes has constantly asked for James to be given time and not be overhyped, but there comes a point when she makes not hyping her up look almost neglectful.
It was perhaps a desire to keep James off the radar for as long as possible that led Wiegman to hold the 21-year-old back from the starting lineup for England’s opening World Cup game against Haiti. But as England laboured the need for the creative and unpredictable James, in the absence of Fran Kirby and Beth Mead, was evident.
She still shies away from the spotlight as much as she can. After a player-of-the-match performance against South Korea in February, Lucy Bronze called the shy James back to speak to the press, wrapping an arm around her shoulders before singing the young player’s praises. There were 57 words from James in the press conference after her efforts against China.
Instead, the rest of the team wax lyrical. In February, Leah Williamson called her a cheat code and England’s injured captain repeated that on social media after the China game. In March, Karen Carney wrote: “Not since Kelly Smith have I been as excited by a player as I am by Lauren James.”
James is the real deal. She needs time to grow as a person but she is ready to compete and outshine all others on the biggest stages. “I hope whichever club has this player, signed her to a long-term contract,” said a smug Hayes during ITV’s coverage on Tuesday.
