How England talent revolutionary Kay Cossington turned Lionesses into big-game hunters

Cossington promised that she would come. Then they phoned again: “Look, we’ve got a festival this weekend at Preston University; she’ll be playing.”

So Cossington drove up to Blackburn, hunted high and low among hundreds of teams, and eventually found the Blackburn under-14s. And yes, there she was. Clear as day. Cossington recalls the joy of clapping eyes on her.

“The team would play into centre midfield, this young girl would get the ball, dribble through and score,” she says. “Then she would do it again. She was really tiny, so comfortable on the ball, technically proficient; even at a young age she had the vision and sometimes the execution to play the balls you see today.”

That was the day that Keira Walsh started to become an England player. It is also the kind of story that this England team is all about. Girls’ football in England has long been a low-participation sport. It does not have armies of brilliant players bubbling up and scrapping their way to the top.

Many do not even know there is a pathway. It is a place, instead, where the gemstones have to be spotted and polished. The arrival of this England team at the semi-finals of the World Cup is a triumph of talent identification and development. It is all about the search for the Keira Walshes.

If it was only a numbers game, the United States wouldn’t have won only four World Cups, including the past two; they would win every time. The US has by far the largest playing numbers and the most comprehensive mini-soccer programme for girls, yet they were knocked out in the round of 16 by Sweden, and if you look at the thousands of girls playing the game at the base of the pyramid, Sweden were outnumbered by a factor of about ten. And for the past decade, their numbers have been roughly equivalent to England’s.

How to make smaller numbers succeed has been the life work of Cossington, the FA’s head of women’s technical development. The question that really gnawed away at Cossington in her years leading the England talent pathway was: why were Spain so good? Why were they winning age-group competitions when they were even smaller in playing numbers than England and complete minnows compared with the US? And if Cossington could understand that, then maybe she could figure out how to get England finally to beat Germany. They had big numbers, too; twice as many registered players as England. Over the past 15 years, Cossington has coached a number of England’s age-group teams and, she says: “I’d stood in the technical area playing Germany and we couldn’t beat them – we always knew they were going to play a flat 4-4-2 and that there’d be no surprises, but we couldn’t beat them. I wanted to know: what was it that was going on?”

Thus, Cossington launched herself into a project: how best to maximise England’s playing resources. Her interest in other countries became an obsession and she set her sights on six nations – the US, Japan, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and France – with the intention of learning the lessons from each of them.

“I spent a lot of time in each of those countries,” she says. The good thing about women’s football worldwide is that there is a feeling of “we are all in this together, we all need the game to grow” – and so intellectual property is a commodity that most are happy to share.

It would take a book, rather than a newspaper article, to summarise, but here are a few key Cossington takeaways. You have to have your best girls playing with boys.

“We hadn’t engaged with boys’ football in England,” Cossington says. “It was still seen as taboo. Whereas in Germany, the Netherlands and France, mixed football was a huge talent development resource. In the Netherlands, they wouldn’t look at talent unless they were playing in a boys’ programme. I said, ‘Do you miss any?’ They said, ‘Sure we do, but with the resource we get, our best talent is playing in boys’ football.’ ”

In Spain, Cossington found a system that prioritised high levels of competition through the age groups. They also play a lot of futsal, a game similar to five-a-side football but which is played on a longer, thinner indoor pitch, with two 20-minute halves and a smaller ball. ("That’s something we’re looking at,” Cossington says.) In Germany, she found a residential model in which the best players from under-13 age groups would live, train and be schooled together. The ultimate product of that has been Alexandra Popp, the Wolfsburg striker.

Cossington first coached a team playing against Popp at under-20s level, 13 years ago. “We all knew she was going to be exceptional,” she says. “And she’d been training with the boys at this elite school.”

Yet there is no single model that translates, says Cossington, and she alighted on different pathways in different parts of the country.

“The South West, where there was a really small participation pool and limited professional clubs, looked very different to the North West, which was thriving with professional clubs, and the Midlands, that had the biggest girls’ grassroots league in the country,” she says.

When Katie Robinson – the 21-year-old Brighton & Hove Albion forward, who was a surprise inclusion in the World Cup squad – was discovered in Truro, Cornwall, for instance, the imperative was to work with her local club and manage her transition to Bristol City. A similar set-up came to play in the east of the country, where Lauren Hemp, the 23-year-old Manchester City winger, was spotted in Norfolk. Soon, with the support of Norwich City, she was training with a boys’ team and a talent coach was detailed to work with her.

In other words, England started collecting talented players all around the country and identifying the differing methods required to work with them. Cossington calls these IDPs – individual development plans. “No matter what style or level of football you are playing, if you are talented, we are going to find you,” she says. “We want to give these girls a chance. And then we provide a programme that allows you to excel.”

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Thus has this collection of England semi-finalists been woven together, with Cossington tying together all the loose ends. Hers has been one of the most extraordinary journeys of all, because she has known most of the team since their teens. Of course, it should never have to be this way again. The European Championship last summer produced a surge in playing numbers; this was boosted by the government edict for schools to give girls the same access to football that the boys are given. Meanwhile, Cossington has been unrolling inner-city talent ID programmes; 3,500 new girls have been recruited from them and already 74 are in elite pathways.

The base of the pyramid for the next generation of England players should be totally different. The present team are, meanwhile, proving how far the slim pickings can go.

– The Times

Originally published as How England talent revolutionary Kay Cossington turned Lionesses into big-game hunters