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
Comments