Rachel Daly's journey to the top
When she was a teenager, Daly was told she would never play for England. Now she's a European champion and a key member of the Lionesses squad...
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When Rachel Daly was called up for her first major tournament by Phil Neville ahead of the last World Cup four years ago, the now Barclays Women’s Super League Golden Boot winner recalled to me how after the Under 17 World Cup in 2008, she was told she would never play for the England senior team.
Part of a talented group which included Lucy Bronze and Jordan Nobbs, England got to the semi-finals in what was a good tournament for the young Lionesses, but not for Daly, of Leeds United at the time.
“That World Cup was a bit of a turning point, it wasn’t very good for me,” she told me. “I didn’t get called in after that for a while and I almost wanted to give up. You’re a million miles away from home, 16 years old and getting told you’d never play for England.
“It was a turning point, I wanted to quit. I went home, I was in tears, didn’t know whether I was coming or going. It was all I ever focused on and it felt like it was being taken away from me. It upset me for a long time, I felt like I had no purpose anymore.”
Daly now has 70 senior caps, is a European champion and may well lead the line for her country against Denmark tomorrow, hot off the back of the best domestic season of her career.
To get from there to now has been a mental battle for the Aston Villa striker, as charted by three of her early coaches who all played their own roles in her development both on and off the pitch.
“I’d spend a lot of weekends going to see which players were in town,” says Mike Sweetman, who ran the girls’ football programme at Rossett School in Harrogate, North Yorkshire, close to where Daly grew up.
“I remember going to watch a grassroots team. It was just boys and the majority were coming to us, but I was desperate to get some good girls coming to the school, but I got chatting to this bloke who turned out to be Rachel’s dad. He told me she was playing and I hadn’t realised because it was a boy’s game and 21 of them were boys, but she was really good, and he said ‘don’t worry Mike, she’s going to Rossett’ and I was like ‘yes, brilliant!’”
Sweetman recalls how women’s football in the area was “only just taking off” and after the school won the County Cup, he and the staff wanted to do more for girls in Harrogate, and Daly’s arrival was the first key part of that change.
“I just said ‘I don’t know who I’m ringing, but you need to get someone to see this kid’…”
“When Rach came, she was 13 but she played in the U16s, even though we had U13 and U14 teams. She was only Year 7, so people complained, they didn’t want to play with her, but we won anyway! When she arrived, we won everything, we became the most dominant school for girls in the county.
“When she was Year 8, we got to the national semi-final, which was unheard of for a school of our size. We played at Oakwell and the final was at The Riverside which was a dream for me as a Middlesbrough, I was desperate to get there! We did, but we lost the final 3-2. Rach was amazing, she just went from strength to strength. We had to let her play P.E. with the boys because she was too good for the girls.”
Sweetman remembers how the lads love her and she became good friends with them because they saw and appreciated her talent.
One year later, when Daly was in Year 9, they got to the County Cup final again, this time in Daly’s hometown of Harrogate, and Sweetman recalls how he took matters into his own hands to ensure Daly’s talent didn’t go to waste.
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“A couple of weeks before the game I rang the FA because she was off the scale. I just said ‘I don’t know who I’m ringing, but you need to get someone to see this kid’. I didn’t think it would go anywhere, but somebody was coming down from Newcastle for the final.
“We won 4-1 and Rach scored twice, she was brilliant. I think from there she was on the radar. She had some trials and camps with the younger groups. I was also Head of Transition for when they left school, so that was part of it too and making sure Rach’s talent didn’t go unnoticed.
“All she wanted to do was play football. She was sociable, she got on with everyone, especially the football crowd. She had a real social ability and with me as an adult too. I’m really into psychology of players, but she’s difficult to pin down because she was so different. She could be difficult, not for me, but she was just so fully focused on football, nothing else. It’s all she did, all she wanted to do and that ultimate focus is what set her apart from anybody else. She just had a complete desire to play football and to win.”
It wasn’t just England who were paying attention either. The club Daly supported as a child and still does to this day, Leeds United, were looking closely too.
One of the top teams in the country at the time, Leeds had a track record of developing young players and their manager at the time, Rick Passmoor, recalls his first memory of discovering Daly’s talent.
“We had a great connection with Mike and the school and that area,” recalls Passmoor, who is now back at Leeds United. “She came on board around the time she’d started at the school, she was a massive Leeds fan and had a fantastic support mechanism around her. People in the club were pointing her out to me from around U14 level, so I went down to the Centre of Excellence a few times to watch her.
“She stood out. I just said ‘we need to ensure someone is here with this talent to push her’, because she wasn’t being challenged enough. She was too good for that level, but she was going to come across very good players on her way up and what we didn’t want is to get to that stage and she hadn’t been tested.
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