Champion Of The World!

Everton Under-23 defender Lewis Gibson is back at USM Finch Farm after helping England Under-17s to a fantastic World Cup success in India last month…

 

Welcome back, Lewis, and very well done. What an experience that must have been?

It was amazing and it’s quite surreal when I look back on it. I never thought as a youngster that I would play for England in a World Cup, especially in India. A couple of weeks before the tournament I got an email from the FA saying that I was in the squad. I was delighted, I’d been to all the camps last season and so I’ve just been trying to carry on where I left off.

When the senior England team plays in a tournament we tend to know all about the opposition but that’s not the case at Under-17 level so preparation must be vitally important?

There’s always a lot of briefing before any game. We have a lot of meetings and there is always stuff going on behind the scenes to help us. You can’t always be relying on the coaches during the game, you have to have an idea yourself about who you’re up against. Generally, the likes of Chile and Brazil are similar teams but when we played Iraq we knew that they would be trying to make it a scrappy game. We picked out the key players, we knew they had a good striker, for example, and we managed the game well.

England got off to a great start in the tournament and the momentum just carried on…