Cleverley begins World Cup journey

It will be seven years next week since Daisy Cleverley made her Football Ferns debut.

She’s come a long way since then, when she was a 17-year-old out of Western Springs College in Auckland, playing at the OFC Women’s Nations Cup in Papua New Guinea.

But while the midfielder has been a fixture in squads for most of that time, attending the 2015 Fifa Women’s World Cup in Canada, the 2016 Olympics in Rio (as a travelling reserve), the 2019 World Cup in France, and this year’s Olympics in Tokyo, she’s only earned a dozen caps.

Cleverley is hoping to make it 13 when the Ferns play their first match under new coach Jitka Klimkova´ tomorrow against reigning Olympic champions Canada in Ottawa, and to grow the tally from there.

Two of her 12 appearances for the Ferns have come in their last two matches – losses to the United States and Sweden at the Olympics in July that sent them out after the group stage.

They were also two of her five starts for the national team and came almost seven years after her first two, in a pair of onesided matches against Oceania minnows. Otherwise, there was one in 2017, in a win over Hungary, as well as a handful of bench appearances, so when she got the nod in Japan, she was overcome with emotion.

‘‘When I got the call-up to start [against the US], I called my mum and started crying,’’ Cleverley said.

‘‘I was like, this is the best feeling ever. Starting is the peak, rather than getting five minutes at the end of the game.’’

In early 2017, she moved to the United States to take up a football scholarship at UC Berkeley in California and play in the American college system. After completing her degree, she moved to Georgetown University in Washington, DC, where she is playing her final season in the college game.

In that time, she feels she has grown plenty as a player, to the point where she has had a change of mindset during all those matches she has spent sitting on the bench, behind players like Katie Duncan, Kirsty Yallop (both now retired), Betsy Hassett and Ria Percival, who have all earned in excess of 100 caps.

‘‘Early on, I never expected to go on. There was a fear in me to go on, because I was like, ‘wow, these players are amazing, and I don’t want to muck up’,’’ she said.

‘‘Then as I got older and better – and when I went to America, and I gained more confidence in myself – I think my mindset started to shift to be more like, ‘no, I need to get on the field’.

‘‘Even though [the players ahead of me] had all these caps, I thought it would help the team if I helped push them, so I could get on the field.’’

Former Ferns coach Tom Sermanni gave Cleverley a boost when he handed her those starts at the Olympics, but she now has to impress Klimkova´ , who has been handed a lengthy contract through to the end of the 2027 World Cup.

It’s a task for which she is well-equipped, having played for the new Ferns coach during her previous stint in New Zealand as coach of the national under-17 team, including at the 2014 World Cup, where she scored a stunning solo goal in a 1-1 draw with Paraguay.

Cleverley said Klimkova´ had brought a lot of energy to proceedings during her first few days in charge of the Ferns and that there was a lot of excitement as the team’s focus turns to the 2023 World Cup, to be played in New Zealand and Australia.

‘‘There’s a whole lot of new faces as well on this tour,’’ Cleverley said, referring not only to Klimkova´ and her staff but also the six uncapped players in the squad.

‘‘Everyone’s here for the same goal, to make the 2023 World Cup squad, so it’s definitely the start of something.’’