The Need For Mead (Beth Mead interview)

A six-page exclusive with the Arsenal and England forward, published four months before she would win the European Championship and its Golden Boot. Mead talks about the 14-minute hat-trick against Northern Ireland that made her the first woman to score a competitive England treble at Wembley, and about the ball now sitting in a box in her living room. She is candid about being left out of the Team GB Olympic squad and about channelling it: ‘angry Meado’ is real, she says, and she plays her best football when she has something to prove. There is craft here too, on one-v-ones, crossing and a conscious decision to shoot more under Jonas Eidevall, and a longer argument about dual careers, drawn from her own Sunderland-and-university years and now backing the Beth Mead Scholarship at Teesside.