Stanway's perfect timing keeps Euros dream intact

It was the type of goal that Georgia Stanway, growing up in the footballing outpost of Barrow-in-Furness, playing in the back garden with her brothers, would always have imagined herself scoring.

- MARK CRITCHLEY

The sort of emphatic, long-range strike that is befitting of such a stage, that deserved to book England’s place in the semi-finals of another major international tournament.

But in the white heat of the extra time win over Spain in Brighton, when that dream had become a reality, it was a moment she could barely remember. “It all feels like a massive blur at the moment,” the Bayern Munich-bound midfielder said after the final whistle. “I need to watch it back and see where I was, how it went in the net, I literally can’t remember. I remember saying to one of the girls, ‘At what moment did we actually score?’”

That is one of the great ironies of such moments in elite sport. While a goal as spectacular and as significant as Stanway’s will live long in the memory of many who witnessed it, whether they were one of the 28,994 inside the Amex or the millions watching at home, it will only be a vague, hazed mess of sweat, strains and lactic acid in the mind of the woman who scored it. You wait all your life to score a goal like that and then struggle to remember how you did what did, or even why you did.