The She Kicks Locker Room: Captain’s Chat with Dani Bowman (Brighton & Hove Albion)

Brighton’s captain is disarmingly honest about a role she says she never saw herself taking. Hope Powell handed her the armband and it genuinely shocked her; she is vocal and loud on the pitch, and a good deal quieter away from it. What she learned, she learned from the captains she played under – aspects of Laura Bassett, of Jayne Ludlow, and of Faye White’s insistence on the collective, because you cannot always bellow at people. The armband has made her more relaxed rather than less, though she concedes that might be age. Her highlights are two draws, with Chelsea and at Manchester City, in which she felt the team nailed a game plan. Her advice to a new captain is not to become so busy helping everyone else that your own game suffers.