Lauren James' emergence in Englan's World Cup side has suddenly made them the tournament favoutites. But tracing his story back through the youth systems of both men's and women's football shows that her ability will be felt far beyond Sarina Wiegman's side.
Category
🥇
SportsTranscript
00:00 Hello there, you, Adam Cleary from 442 here and there is a question due in the rounds
00:09 at the minute and that is Lauren James the best women's footballer in the world?
00:14 And yes, yes she is, yeah.
00:19 That's the intro.
00:24 Alright so hopefully you will have seen this week England produced the greatest Chinese
00:28 battering since I first ordered chicken balls but it was more interesting not for the score
00:32 line but for the system.
00:33 Serena Vigman did of course famously not make a single change to her starting eleven during
00:38 the Euros, it was always this 4-2-3-1 and despite the injuries she had she just went
00:42 like for like with those replacements so we started the World Cup like this but then some
00:48 middling alright-ish performances coupled with an injury to Kiera Walsh meant that she
00:52 was going to have to change things and boy oh boy did she.
00:56 She went and moved from a back four to a back three which of course makes sense when you've
00:59 got three excellent centre backs, a centre forward who can also play at left back and
01:03 one of the best attacking right backs in the world so that's quite good.
01:07 Katie Zellum it was went into the middle to replace Walsh, Stanway stayed where she was
01:11 and interestingly instead of either Russo or Daly up front she actually went with Russo
01:16 and Hemp as a two.
01:17 Now while you look at it here and just think two centre forwards it wasn't really like
01:20 that Russo was kind of pretty much central and Hemp either played on the left or the
01:24 right she had all this horizontal freedom across the pitch to go find whatever space
01:28 she wanted.
01:29 What was really interesting about that what was interesting about the whole system was
01:32 the way it was set up to get the best out of Lauren James and why is that interesting
01:38 I hear you ask well because she got three assists and two goals which is absolutely
01:43 insane so that means that as far as the England national team are concerned and by extension
01:48 probably the entire rest of women's football we are now in, welcome to it, the Lauren James
01:53 era.
01:54 The idea behind this was with Hemp sort of free to go onto whichever channel she wanted
01:57 to that would always leave an inverse space for Lauren James to get into she would drop
02:01 back and play with the two centre midfielders because she's so good on the ball that allows
02:05 you to get a nice little overload there but also she would float into the pocket that
02:09 then opened as a result of the defenders going to worry about Hemp and of course Russo's
02:13 movement is so good she can tie defenders up by pushing them forward by pulling them
02:16 back so she was finding any pocket of space she could meaning she was always, always,
02:21 always the creative outlet for whoever was doing the build up.
02:24 And just frankly once you've set up a team of England's quality to enable a player the
02:29 standard of Lauren James to just have so much time and space and freedom and just ability
02:33 to do all the things she's good at that's it, it's game over.
02:37 Like genuinely Leah Williamson, England's captain, has referred to Lauren James as basically
02:41 a cheat code in women's football and that's exactly how it looked against China like Lauren
02:45 James was playing this game on a controller that had more buttons on it.
02:50 And while yes the obvious caveat to this is that it was only China nobody was really expecting
02:54 that to be a massive test for England they pretty much went toe to toe with Denmark they
02:58 only lost that game 1-0 they got the same score against Haiti as England did the gulf
03:02 in class was not as big as Lauren James made it look.
03:06 But what's so important about all that loads of players have these breakout games where
03:09 they totally run the show and they look like their next big thing what makes Lauren James
03:14 so different?
03:15 I'll put it to you this way sometimes a player comes along and they do things you've never
03:19 seen before and you just know that's amazing and it's going to change football right?
03:23 We've seen that happen okay?
03:25 But sometimes a player comes along and they don't do anything you've never seen before
03:29 they do all the things that everybody else is doing it's just they're doing them on a
03:33 level you did not previously realise was possible and that is what really changes football.
03:39 Lauren James is not the most skilful player we've ever seen in the women's game she's
03:43 not the strongest player we've ever seen in the women's game she's not the quickest player
03:47 we've ever seen in the women's game she's not even the most technical player we've seen
03:51 in the women's game she's not the best passer she's not the best finisher she's not doing
03:55 any one individual thing that we don't already see in the WSL and in the World Cup but what
04:00 she does is all of those things and she does them at the highest possible level and in
04:06 such a way that it just looks incredibly easy for her.
04:10 If you watched her at all in the WSL last season if you got her in a tight area she
04:13 would just very comfortably dribble her way out of it if she got any sort of open field
04:17 in front of her it was virtually impossible for anyone to keep up with her if she was
04:20 ever able to isolate defenders she had the ability to just dribble around them as if
04:23 they weren't even there and when instead you forced it into more congested areas she was
04:27 good enough again that she could just weave her way through two, three, often four players.
04:32 There wasn't even any foot you could reliably force her onto because she could pass and
04:35 finish with both and to top it all off on the even rarer occasion you were able to get
04:40 into a physical duel with her there were virtually no players in the league that had the strength
04:44 to knock her off the ball. For the current standard of women's professional football
04:49 there is almost no weakness in her game and that is what this is all about because you
04:55 see and I'm going to use the men's game as an example here every now and then a player
04:59 comes along and they make you realise that so many things about the game from the coaching
05:03 to the tactics to everything have to evolve and they have to change. Like if she goes
05:07 on to have the World Cup it looks like she's going to have you are not going to be able
05:10 to move for stories about how when she was growing up she trained with the boys and she
05:15 got the same kind of coaching as her brother did and that's not a coincidence that's part
05:20 of a story that's why she's as good as she is. Again England's captain Leah Williamson
05:24 has said that part of the reason we're seeing so many ACL injuries in the women's game now
05:28 is because they've been given the sort of schedule and the sort of workload that we
05:32 expect of the men's game despite the fact that when they were developing when they were
05:36 coming through academies they weren't getting anywhere near the sort of physical training
05:40 required to handle that. That's because in men's football you can get picked up by an
05:43 academy from the age of like five or six and then you're in the system and you're constantly
05:47 being given all this technical practice yes but they're also building your body to be
05:52 able to handle that. Women's football as Williamson has said is totally different you're sort
05:56 of training part-time you get two or three sessions a week and then bang you're a professional
06:00 and you're expected to just sort of adapt and so the reason why James looks like she's
06:04 on a different level is because she's 21 she's about one generation removed from the current
06:09 stars of women's football so she's benefited from better quality and better access to coaching
06:14 and so the reason, see I did get there in the end, the reason why this is so important
06:19 for the women's game as a whole is it just goes to show you can have players the standard
06:24 of Lauren James she hasn't got to be an anomaly or look way better than everybody else you
06:28 can just have players that standard if you invest in the academy setup if you invest
06:34 in the coaching and you've got all these big big big big clubs now your Liverpool's your
06:38 Man United's your Arsenal's your Chelsea's just in this country who are taking the women's
06:42 side of their club so seriously well there you go would you like 11 Lauren Jameses because
06:47 you can afford them and that is not to take anything away from James herself I hasten
06:53 to add she has got where she is today because she has worked incredibly hard to get there
06:58 but I think she would probably be the first to tell you that she has worked that hard
07:01 because she was allowed to work that hard there are not really any other players in
07:06 the world right now like Lauren James but there very well might be if the kind of training
07:10 that she's had access to was the norm and not the exception but yes anyway long story
07:15 short it's coming home so anyway that's a lot of comments in the box below please try
07:20 and not be weird that would be very nice for me grab me on Twitter @AdamCleary442 out
07:26 now season preview edition it's the best one go and buy it but until next time I've been
07:31 Adam Cleary this is 442 see you soon bye bye bye bye
07:35 Bye. Bye. Bye