Lucy Bronze believes every player at the European Championship feels a greater pressure to perform because of the boost women’s football receives as a result of success.
“Every single player that puts on a shirt in this tournament probably feels that,” the defender said, as England prepare to play Sweden in their quarter-final on Thursday night. “I can imagine the Swiss team feel that because they’re the home nation. Every other team wants to replicate what England did in 2022, what the Netherlands did before us, and really boost women’s football and we know that success comes from that.
“We respect England, the team they have and everything they have achieved so far,” Asllani said. “Do we fear them? No. We don’t have the word fear in our dictionary. We look up the word courage. Of course, you have to respect one of the best sides in the world and we have the perfect gameplan for this match. I feel a sense of longing to start the game. We want to go out and play our football intensely and physically. In our minds there is only one outcome and that is to win.”
The key to success for England is focusing on themselves on and off the pitch. “Coming off the back of the France game and having a lot of talking points actually brought the team closer together,” Bronze said.
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“I think you saw that in the two performances that came after. We’re not focused too much on noises around other teams or ourselves. We’re only focused on what we do on the training pitch, what we do in games, how we recover, how we perform and how we lift each other up.”
Bronze also went deeper on what the mantra of being “proper England” means. “We have a lot of younger players and new players who have very different experiences of playing for England compared to the likes of myself, who know that England used to have to dig deep all the time,” she said. “The 2015 World Cup was the first time we beat Germany – that’s insane to think about now – but England in the past had to dig out performances and was the underdog, not the favourite.
“This England team has developed from there, football has changed. Obviously we’re a very talented team, with a lot of technical and tactical ability, but we don’t want to ever forget that we are England, we are ‘proper England’, and if push comes to shove we can win a game in any means possible.”
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