England star's touching reason behind shirt swap after Keira Walsh injury
With all the other headlines set to take centre stage – England’s 1-0 victory over Denmark, Keira Walsh's knee update, Lauren James’ sublime – it's more than understandable that a post-match shirt swap flew under the radar on Friday evening.
England’s Chloe Kelly traded jerseys with Danish forward Nicoline Sorensen following the Lionesses’ narrow second group stage match win at the Sydney Football Stadium.
But James’ stunning first-half goal and eventual game-winner was swiftly overshadowed as Walsh was stretchered off shortly after the half-hour mark in what appeared to be the work of another ACL injury. It’s since been confirmed that Walsh did not suffer any ACL injury and will remain at the Terrigal team base in Australia to continue her recovery.
Nevertheless, in the afterglow of Friday’s match, the mood was muted and sombre as thoughts remained on the uncertainty of Walsh’s condition and the ostensible ACL epidemic stalking women’s football.
And in a moment of striking poignancy, Kelly was spotted swapping shirts with Everton ’s Nicoline Sorensen of Denmark. When asked about the trade, the Manchester City star said simply: “She’s in the ACL crew,” Kelly said. “We were together throughout our journey.”
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“The ACL crew” has become a succinct, if not grim, universal shorthand to designate the spate of women’s football stars who have suffered respective ACL injuries.
The injury is not new, though its prevalence, and the subsequent number of players comprising the crew, has ramped up in recent years due to a combination of increased workload and intensity and long-standing issues of underinvestment in the women’s game.
In fact, it is believed that women’s footballers are six times more likely to be affected by an ACL injury than their male counterparts.
Lucy Bronze battles with Nicoline Sorensen during the World Cup match between England and Denmark (Photo by Andy Cheung/Getty Images)Both Kelly and Sorensen sustained ACL tears in 2021, with the duo forced to spend months on the touchlines as well as miss respective major tournaments with their nations.
Kelly’s injury arrived in Manchester City’s penultimate match of the 2020/21 season after the then-23-year-old, who had signed from Everton at the start of the season, clattered with Birmingham City centre-back Rebecca Holloway on her way to a hat-trick.
Kelly had been relishing an exceptional debut season with City, with a return of 16 goals and 14 assists in 34 appearances. But she was forced to spend nearly a year on the sidelines, missing the Olympic Games while undergoing intense rehabilitation before returning ahead of the 2022 European championships.
Months after Kelly’s ACL injury, Sorensen, who had been recruited to Everton as Kelly’s replacement, fell to the ground after what appeared to be an innocuous tussle with Birmingham defender Holloway. A scan eventually revealed the Dane had torn her ACL, sidelining Sorensen for more than 14 months as she missed last summer’s Euros.
The pair’s shirt swap and coinciding reasoning on a day blighted by worries of yet another ACL injury speaks to the sense of solidarity being built within the women’s game, where club and national team divisions only stretch so far amid the indiscriminate ACL threat.
After England’s Beth Mead suffered her ACL injury earlier last year, Barcelona and Spain star Alexia Putellas, who beat Mead to last year’s Ballon d’Or, wished the Arsenal striker a speedy recovery while issuing a rallying cry for the pair to “be back better”.
Meanwhile, Mead has used her platform to call for more research into the crisis. Those calls were immediately echoed as news of Walsh’s injury made headlines, with the Barcelona midfielder receiving outpourings from all over the game as many feared the worst.
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