The She Kicks Locker Room: Game Ready With Emma Kelly

Sunderland’s stand-in captain, an old-timer in the Lasses ranks by her own reckoning at 25, walks through a matchday. Scrambled egg on toast, as much water as possible, a banana and a gel she is polite about at best. She keeps her focus on herself rather than the opposition, gets a lecture from her dad the day before, and prepares in a changing room with the music loud and everyone dancing, plus some visualisation of her first few passes. Nerves always come, and a coach once told her that the day they stop is the day to stop playing. The answer that lasts, though, is the recovery day: coaches back from Bristol or Lewes at two or three in the morning, a seven o’clock alarm, and a day teaching PE.