‘I needed to be away with people who don’t know football’
England’s Fran Kirby says a break from game with friends helped her get over long-term injury
Fran Kirby texted her aunties with the words: “Booked the flights. We’re going.” The destination was Mexico – specifically, a five-star spa resort meandering into the Caribbean Sea, for 11 nights, beginning for Kirby with the unenviable job of soothing two women “terrified of flying” through an eight-hour flight.
Kirby paid for all of them. At first her aunties – one working at a school, the other an accountant – would not let her. But by that point she “just needed to get away”.
What was last season if not her annus horribilis? First the injury to her ankle sustained in England’s World Cup qualifier against Wales. Then her hamstring. Then her knee. At some points, Kirby’s rehabilitation programme became so desperate that she would arrive at Chelsea’s Cobham training ground at 7am and leave in the evening.
Mexico was a present for two women who had “supported me so much through my year”.
“It just got on top of me, and I needed to take away people who didn’t know much about football,” Kirby says. “They didn’t speak to me once about football, and that was the most amazing thing for me.
“I was just so low with everything. I’d come back from one injury and get another one. Long, tiring days. You’re seeing your
team-mates go out and train and that’s all you want to do. It was a case of not feeling like I could give as much as I wanted to – for me, I’m zero or 100.”
In Mexico she found “a sense of acceptance: to relax, to accept that I did have a tough time building myself back up”. Kirby has, by her own admission, endured “quite an injured career”. Even 2018 – the year she was the PFA Player of the Year and FWA Footballer of the Year – was dogged by a grade-three ligament tear in an ankle, which was in turn book-ended by a fractured knee and tendinitis.
The solution? Buy a dog. Aged three, Kirby – still only 5ft 1in at 26 – would play in the garden with her neighbour’s rottweiler, but her parents were unmoved by her pleas for a dog of her own. One day she
‘Some days I close the doors and don’t speak to anyone. Sometimes you need alone space’
decided to adopt one. Kirby was with her Chelsea team-mate Bethany England, who “wasn’t that friend that tried to be reasonable. She was just, like, ‘Let’s do it.’” As a result, England is now godmother to Cody the cockapoo.
“It was the best therapy I’ve ever had for my injury,” Kirby says. “When he was a puppy, you had to watch him 24/7. I wasn’t lying on the sofa upset. It was, what’s he chewing? Where is he? It was a case of distracting my mind and finding happiness.”
It has been a lifelong journey. Kirby was 14 when her mother, Denise, died suddenly from a brain haemorrhage. Years later, as the full force of her grief hit her for the first time, she plunged into depression. She quit football and rarely went to college. Kirby says she is “still the annoying little girl everyone could identify by her laugh”, but is learning to be comfortable embracing successes.
It was reading an interview with England team-mate Toni Duggan, for instance, that helped Kirby accept the “Mini Messi” tag foisted on her by then England manager Mark Sampson at the 2015 World Cup. “There was a quote: ‘Why can’t she just be Fran Kirby? Why have you always got to compare? She’s Fran – no one else.’ That settled me quite a lot. She’s absolutely right. I need to focus on being Fran Kirby.”
She had to learn to enjoy that tournament – “I just got myself so worked up about being nervous and wanting to play well” – but laughs now as she recalls sharing a room with Steph Houghton and the England captain’s pained attempts to elicit conversation from a mute Kirby: “‘Do you want to go to lunch?’ ‘Yep.’ I was so shy and nervous to be around these girls I’d watched on TV.”
Back then, Kirby was the only player from the second tier in the England squad and still supplementing her football career with girls’ coaching sessions for Reading’s Community Foundation. “I was emailing school after school after school, like, ‘I want to come in and do girls’ sessions. The first holiday camp had, I think, 10 girls. By the time I left, it was over 50.”
In those days she was restless with ambition: “I was on this spiral of wanting everything. I wanted a dog, to be a professional footballer, to have a house, to buy my dad a house.” Kirby is, has always been, a perfectionist – Emma Hayes, the Chelsea manager, summed it up with the words: “I want her to find enjoyment in as much as possible of what we have, as life is short.” Habitually Kirby will deflect praise and ruminate on mistakes and is still learning, day by day, to “get better at being satisfied”.
“There are days when I struggle and when I don’t want to get out of bed,” she says, “There are days when I go home, lay on the sofa, close all the doors and do not speak to anyone. But everyone has that. It’s not, ‘Ah – I’m so anti-social. I don’t like anyone,’ or anything like that – it’s just us as humans. Sometimes you need that alone space. It’s something I’ve learnt that I have to do to switch off, calm myself down and go again.
“My drive is to be happy in what I’m doing. When I lose that happiness, I know it’s not for me. I definitely think I’ve found my happiness and my home.”