A great end to the season - World Champions 2010
After a successful season in training, Great Britain Women were looking forward to getting to the World Championships in Milan and start the long awaited tournament. GB flew out to Italy on Monday 30th August 2010 for a couple of days training before starting the games.
We had Italy, Iran, Singapore and Denmark in our group and started playing the group games on Wednesday. Our first game was against Denmark, a team that we knew we could beat but a high goal target was set to get our goal difference up on the other teams in the group. We were successful on both counts - 16-2 being the final score.
Thursday saw us play our remaining three group games, against Iran, Singapore and Italy. We had not met either Iran or Singapore at any training tournament throughout the year so started the Iran game quite conservatively to see how they played and then pressured from there. We beat Iran 4-0 but the game was not our greatest hour. The referee was very biased towards Iran which frustrated some players. GB play a very hard game and will tackle the opponents hard if they have the ball, each time a GB player did this in the Iranian game, the opposition would shout out and squeal which automatically made the referees blow for a foul, even though it was a legal tackle, which was extremely frustrating. All the same we did our job and came out with a win.
The Singapore game was very similar to the Denmark game. We set up our defence so the opposition would get drawn in then went out to tackle them, win the ball back and break. We came out 14-0 winners.
Our final group game was against Italy, the host nation with a great deal of home support behind them. We didn't let that phase us though and beat Italy 4-0. We were all extremely impressed with our first group games, having scored 38 goals and only had 2 against us.
The second round saw another two groups being created with the winners and runners up of each of the four groups put together. We were up against New Zealand, who finished top of their initial group, and Spain and Holland who finished second in their respective groups. Our first game in this group was against Holland and we secured an easy win finishing 8-1.
New Zealand was our next game. We hadn't played against them this season and knew they were looking good. They were really up for the game, knowing that we were favourites to win. However, we ran out 5-4 winners in a hard fought game.
Our final game of the second group was against Spain. It was a much easier game and we came out 7-1 winners. This put us top of the second group and through to the semi final on Sunday.
As the semi finals and finals were televised our semi against France would be at 8:30 on the sunday morning. The early start did not bother our supporters that were all there to watch. It was so good to hear our supporters drowning out the noise of the French supporters and this spurred us on all the more.
Going into the semi final was very nerve wracking, it was the game that decided whether we were to play in the final or not get a medal at all. Nerves disappeared as soon as the whistle blew for the start of the game and we won 6-2. We were in the final against Germany, a repeat of the 2008 final, and our chance to retain the World title.
I went into the final with confidence, I knew we could win, everybody wanted it so much. We were ahead for most of the game. Germany played 5 out (man on man) for most of the second half to try and win the ball back, but we were able to keep the ball and sprint past the players to score two goals into empty nets. Germany did manage to claw two goals back late on in the game but it was too late and at the final whistle the score was 5-3 to us and so happy to have won the gold medal.
Standing on the podium was an experience I will never forget and am already looking to the 2011 season to try and retain the gold medal at the European Championships and relive the feeling of winning and being a gold medalist!
