Keira Walsh, Lucy Bronze and their Barcelona teammates have been messaging each other throughout the World Cup. The running joke? “We’ll see you in the final.” The draw and results have delivered the punchline: a mouthwatering tie between the European champions England and a technically gifted Spain.
“We message before each game saying good luck, and obviously the idea was hopefully we would see each other in the final – but we didn’t actually expect it to happen,” Walsh said.
“I’m excited,” Bronze said. “I’m really good friends with a couple of them, my teammates in Barcelona; myself and Keira know them very well. We’ve been speaking to them throughout the tournament and even before the tournament started we had a joke saying: ‘We’ll see you in the final’ – and that’s come true.”
Spain offer a challenge England have yet to come up against in this World Cup, being a team who like to hog possession as the Lionesses do. England were forced to come from behind against Spain in the quarter-finals of the Euros last year on the way to a first major trophy. It is a “massive” test, said Walsh. “They are a great team,” the midfielder said. “They have got some world-class players, but again we are looking forward to it. It’s a challenge that we have faced before and hopefully it will be a good game on Sunday. We have full respect for Spain – they are an unbelievable team.
“Both of us are going to be trying to keep the ball but ultimately I think it just comes down to on the day. We’ve got the experience of being in a final before and a little bit of fight, a little bit of competitiveness. We have gone behind and come back. All those things kind of add up. I think this group is really excited about where we can go.”
The strength of that group is where Sunday’s game could be won or lost. England are a together group; you can feel it in the air, hear it in the way they talk. “The strength of this team is we stick together, we’ve got an incredibly tight bond, we’ve got a tight-knit team,” Bronze said. “Winning the Euros last gave us a huge amount of confidence, but we’ve suffered a few losses this year in terms of big players, a lot of noise on the outside, and it’s just pushed us closer together. Before the tournament people had us down to get knocked out [early] and now we’re in the final.”
There is less unity in the Spain camp, with 15 players having signed a letter to the Spanish football federation last year calling for changes and saying the environment and culture of the team was affecting their health. The federation came out fighting, backing the manager, Jorge Vilda, and the set-up and the players were told they would not play for the team again, unless they apologised. Three returned to the squad for the World Cup – Aitana Bonmatí, Mariona Caldentey and Ona Batlle – and three actively declared themselves out. The fissures in the group are clear, with Vilda regularly ignored during celebrations at this World Cup and having his outstretched hand ignored by the Ballon d’Or winner Alexia Putellas after she was substituted in Spain’s semi-final defeat of Sweden.
Walsh, though, is not shocked at how Spain have performed against that backdrop. “For me, honestly it’s not a surprise,” she said. “I see those girls every day and how competitive they are. I think it shows their professionalism for them to kind of park it and do the job they have done and get to a World Cup final.”
For Bronze, reaching the final after semi-final heartbreak in 2015 and 2019 means the chance to tick the final box on a very long list. “In 2015 it was heartbreaking because of how it happened: I don’t think any team’s suffered a defeat by a fluky own goal in the last minute of a game, the one game we actually had played better than the other team,” she said. “In the other games we probably didn’t deserve to win as much. In 2019, personally for me it was a heartache because it was my best year in football, everything seemed to be going my way and then the semi-final hit like a ton of stones. We have finally made it now.
“I’ve always said the one thing I’ve wanted for England is to get a star above my crest. The men have it and we don’t.”
