One of the most stirring and affective qualities of sport – really good sport, mind – is its ability to express long stretches of time in the flicker of a moment. The goal you celebrated wasn’t just a goal: it was the product of a choreographed move, a tactical plan, days and weeks of training and drilling. The outrageous nutmeg you shared in the group chat wasn’t just a nutmeg: it was the hundreds of failed nutmegs that went into honing and chiselling that particular skill. And when you watch a great athlete, on some level you’re not simply gawping at a coloured blob on a screen. You’re seeing the years of work they put in, the obstacles they have overcome to entertain you. You’re seeing the journey.
But of course there are grades and shades to this process. If you didn’t know anything about Fran Kirby in advance of watching her play, you wouldn’t enjoy the experience any less. You would glimpse the magnetic close control, the command of space, the four-dimensional movement, the anticipation and the vision and the speed, and think: “Hey, that Chelsea No 14’s pretty decent.” And yet to a greater extent than with most footballers, Kirby is one of those players who seems inseparable from her journey. Or, put another way: you don’t need to know what Kirby has been through away from the pitch to appreciate her skill on it. But in a weird way, it helps.
Part of the reason for this is Kirby’s own brutal honesty in sharing her life experiences with us. She missed most of last season after contracting pericarditis, a rare and sudden heart disease that almost forced her into retirement at the age of 26. A succession of injuries between 2016 and 2019 brought her career screeching to a halt. And for much of the times in between she has had depression, a condition partly rooted in the sudden death of her mother, Denise. The pair were attending a meeting with one of Reading’s academy coaches when Denise complained of feeling unwell, laid her head on the table and passed out. She died of a brain haemorrhage. Fran was 14.
The question worth posing here, I suppose, is the extent to which it is appropriate to see Kirby the player through the prism of her intensely personal journey. There is a school of thought that the sporting and the personal should be kept broadly separate: that the real story of Kirby’s stunning return to form this season lies entirely within the white lines of the pitch, in those sharp interchanges with Sam Kerr and Pernille Harder, in that ruthless final-third press, in those all-important expected goal numbers, and that all else is irrelevance. And yet, once you know what Kirby has overcome simply to make it out there, is it even possible to un-know something like that?
On a human level, there is something immensely cheering about seeing Kirby at her very best this season. Physically, she seems fully rehabilitated. There was a surreal moment during the 3-0 win over Arsenal on Wednesday night when the 5ft 2in Kirby simply muscled the 5ft 10in Lotte Wubben-Moy off the ball, like some neat Hollywood special effect. Her late goal – similar in many ways to her winning effort against Manchester United last month – was a product of one of those searing sprints in which she seems laughably, cruelly faster than any of the defenders chasing her. She doesn’t so much dribble the ball as magnetise it, sweeps it along with imperceptible wriggles of the feet, sees the space before it materialises, attacks the cross when the cross is still only a thought.
At times like this, you can almost see the teenage Kirby in your mind’s eye: this tiny little girl from the Reading academy running rings around all the boys. And looking back at her career to date, you are struck above all by a sense of being pursued by forces so much larger than herself: grief, depression, injury, shyness, the expectation of being a technical No 10 in a country with no real tradition of attacking playmakers. Even her anointment as “mini-Messi” by her former England manager Mark Sampson in 2015 feels in retrospect like an intolerable burden to place on a young second-tier footballer, a particularly eloquent and headline-grabbing way of setting her up for failure.
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Life, if you’re unlucky, is something that happens to you. Football, if you’re lucky, is something you can make happen yourself. That Kirby has endured and thrived in spite of the randomness and cruelty of life tells us plenty about her environment: the strong influence of coach Emma Hayes (“I want to put a protective arm around her,” she says of Kirby), the fluid attacking quartet that generates the space, territory and chances for her to do her deadliest work. But it also tells us about her own resilience, the resolve and optimism of a naturally introverted woman who seems to have found in football the sort of simple peace and control so rarely available outside it.
Perhaps a large part of this is projection. Perhaps, ultimately, there’s no moral to any of this beyond the observable fact that Fran Kirby is great and more people should know about her. But equally, perhaps it’s possible to see beyond the coloured blob on the screen, to glimpse their journey, to feel the heft of the baggage they carry. To see in those relentless sprints and defence-splitting passes not simply the execution of a tactic but a search for new space, new endings, new sources of joy.
from Football | The Guardian https://ift.tt/3pdtrhQ
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