Safe Hands Of The Laws (Rachael Laws Interview)

Twelve years at Sunderland, a title-winning loan at Liverpool in 2013, a spell at Reading and then a return to Merseyside to help the Reds back up: the Championship Golden Glove winner talks to Jen O’Neill while rehabbing a pre-season rib injury. Laws is generous about the North East players who won the EUROs, saying she felt like a proud mother watching Demi Stokes, Beth Mead, Lucy Bronze and Jill Scott, and that what she likes most is that success has not changed them. She is sharper on goalkeeping itself, noting she only had regular specialist coaching at twenty-seven and wondering where the position might be if Mary Earps’s generation had been coached properly a decade earlier. There is Matt Beard’s Cockney rhyming slang, and a moving passage on the supporters the club had lost.