KB Kicks Back (Karen Bardsley interview)

England’s longest-serving player takes the decade year by year. Karen Bardsley has been first-choice goalkeeper at all five major tournaments of the 2010s and has gone from crowds of 100 at Lincoln Ladies in 2013 to 31,000 at the Etihad, and from paying to play to a game where, she hopes, players no longer live paycheque to paycheque. She argues goalkeeping has changed more than any position, moving from shot-stopping to creating overloads and starting attacks. The tournament recollections are candid: saving the first penalty in the 2011 quarter-final and still going out; underachieving and carrying self-doubt at Euro 2013 as egos crept in; and 2016 at Manchester City, which she calls her most memorable year not for the double but for a team dealing with the death of Zoe Tynan.