Mary Earps on England farewells and giving back: ‘I want to leave the game in a better place than where I found it’

Themselves. They’ve saved a goal. Two goals.

A penalty. They did that thing where they leap to the right but save the shot with their left toe. One of them roared like her.

“All of which could be a total lie,” qualifies the Paris Saint-Germain and former England No 1 as she recalls a trip to the shops in Manchester last Friday . Earps remembers the days when no one was a goalkeeper, not in the ‘ regale someone with your heroics in the shop’ sense; the ‘ show off your gloves publicly’ sense. Vignettes from before England won the 2022 European Championship are retrieved with ease, when many young goalkeepers were appointed goalkeepers by virtue of tardiness or how close one’s head reached the bar; when Earps, during more nomadic spells at Bristol Academy (now Bristol City), Reading and eventually Manchester United, attended training sessions at local clubs and the coach would implore in surreptitious whispers to “have a word with the girls.

None of them want to go in goal at the weekend”. Those days are mostly gone. Earps recalls the launch of the all-weather “Mary Earps Pitch” at Calverton Miners Welfare FC in Nottingham in February, where she spent spare minutes counting the heads of players attending the goalkeeping session on one pitch (33) and the heads of those playing pick-up on the one next to it (20), before stealing a few more minutes to count them again for surety.