Liverpool top scorer Beata Olsson on calls to her psychologist and whirlwind WSL season

Beata Olsson felt boot meet ball and simultaneously the distances travelled to reach it. There was the immediate distance between Everton’s six-yard box, from which Olsson scored the decisive strike in a 2-1 FA Cup victory on the stroke of half-time, and Liverpool’s bench, from which the 25-year-old Sweden striker started the match (the fourth successive time in February she had been named as a substitute). But there was the more important distance — the one separating Liverpool’s summer signing (from the Swedish top-flight club Kristianstad DFF) from the high-ankle sprain in December suffered during a benign set-piece session.

“It was so stupid,” Olsson recalls, shaking her head. The injury sent her record-breaking debut season to a skidding halt and Liverpool into the January window with “extra striker” on their list, signing Martha Thomas on loan from Tottenham Hotspur, Norway forward Anna Josendal from Hammarby IF and Switzerland’s Aurelie Csillag. Olsson, meanwhile, was sent into a spiral: “My first thought was I want to fight.

Then I realised they don’t see me competing for that. Next I just wanted minutes, then it was just, I want to train in my position. “That’s what it came down to.

And I couldn’t even do that. Eventually I was like, ‘S***, this sucks’. ” Three times a week, she was calling the psychologist from Sweden she employed years earlier to ensure “there are as few valleys as possible when things go wrong.