The Big Interview: Ashleigh Neville
The Tottenham Hotspur defender has been on quite the journey across the past six years, juggling going from a full-time job alongside football, to becoming a mum and now realising her dreams...
“Whirlwind is a great way to put it,” laughs Ashleigh Neville when we discuss the changes in both her career and her personal life over the past five years.
Six years ago, the full-back was playing third division football for Coventry United, a team close to home where she’d just become a mum for the first time and close to her school where she worked as a teacher.
So when she made the decision to ditch her comfort zone to head south three long days a week, plus matchday, for the chance to play for Tottenham Hotspur, it was a huge shift in Neville’s life, but once in which she has prospered from.
“When I was at Coventry before I signed for Spurs I thought that was a decent level and then I signed there when the club had been promoted to the Championship [old FA WSL 2 at the time],” Neville recalls.
“I was travelling three nights a week from Birmingham and back to train and then the same on a Sunday for a game. It took us two years to get into the Women’s Super League, but when I first signed here the team was training at the main training facility and the facilities we have access to are incredible. That was a big part of me coming here.”
As Neville puts it, “we’ve gone from 50 people at Cheshunt to 50,000 at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium”, and the defender has been dragged along on the club’s rise from adapting to life in the second tier, to promotion, to top-half challengers, and then to a relegation battle last season, which eventually saw head coach Rehanne Skinner depart.
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Assistant Vicky Jepson guided the team through to the end of the campaign before BK Håcken head coach, Swede Robert Vilahamn, was appointed ahead of pre-season after winning the Damallsvenskan last year.
Aiming to avoid a repeat of last season’s poor performances which saw the team go nine games without a win and at one point look a very real, and almost unthinkable, prospect for relegation back to the Championship, Neville admits it’s been tough to box it away, but they are looking forward under a new head coach.
“We’ve been back in a couple of weeks now and it’s been great to get back in,” she says. “It’s been a bit different, some clubs have been going in later because of the World Cup and the longer break has personally for me been lovely to spend time with the family, but it’s been good to get back on the grass and start to get the minutes in the tank ahead of the new season.
“The World Cup has delayed a few girls coming back but they’re dribbling in now and we have a few new signings in too. Robert coming in is a fresh start, a new head coach, he’s very approachable, very knowledgeable and given us an identity of how we want to play and that’s massive for us. It links in with the men, the academy, he’s a great person and I’ve already enjoyed being out on the grass with him.”
Neville adds, regarding last season, “I think personally we can learn a lot from him and I think we can build on what wasn’t our best season last year. I think there’s a few things we can kind of take positives from and take from that season and help build on. The next few seasons we want to really push on to finish in the top half of the table and then hopefully push for the Champions League spot a few seasons on from that.”
Neville turned 30 earlier this year and is one of the club’s senior squad members, as well as one of their longest serving as she enters her seventh season in the Lilywhites shirt.
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