Kirby: 'Everything I could ever have dreamed of'

On Saturday evening Wembley will come together to celebrate the England career of Fran Kirby, who retired from international football in June, ahead of the game with China PR.

Having won 77 caps and scoring 19 goals, as well as being part of the Lionesses squad which won UEFA EURO 2022 on home soil, the Reading-born attacker announced her decision this summer and will now have a chance to say farewell to the England fans in front of a sell-out crowd at Wembley.

And the occasion will be a far cry from when the Brighton & Hove Albion ace made her senior debut at Hartlepool United back in August 2014.

Kirby had just turned 21 when she made her Lionesses bow – and she’ll never forget the moment she found out she was in the team: “I was quite shocked to be honest, that I was starting the game,” she explains.

“I’d been in the squad for a little bit of time, and you really have to earn your spot in those kinds of settings. I didn’t get a conversation to say I was starting, I just saw the team put up the day before the game and my name was on it. I was like, ‘oh my God, I’m actually starting’. I think they wanted it to be a nice surprise for me to walk into the meeting and see my name on the board.”

The Lionesses head coach at the time was Mark Sampson, who gave Kirby her chance even though she was still then playing outside the top tier with Reading.

The game was at Hartlepool against a highly respected Sweden team, and Kirby – already a prodigiously talented attacking midfielder – scored a trademark clever goal as England won 4-0.

It was the sign of things to come: “I was just this young girl coming into the team from Reading who’d never played at the highest level and had never experienced playing against these players before, so it was a real unknown for me. I was really happy to score and to contribute. And as a team, we put in a really good performance that day.”

Kirby had shown enough to be selected for the England squad which went to the FIFA 2015 World Cup in Canada.

She made an immediate impact on the world stage, scoring England’s first goal of the tournament, a solo effort in the 2-1 opening game win over Mexico: “I remember all of us looking around the changing room at the start of that tournament and feeling, ‘we’ve got a really good team here’, in terms of the starting eleven and the players that could come on. You could see there was hunger in the squad.”

The Lionesses came third in that tournament, as Kirby recalls: “We were disappointed with how the game ended in the semi-final, losing to a last-minute goal against Japan, but to go on and beat Germany in the bronze medal game speaks volumes of the people who were in the team.”

Kirby scored in all four major tournaments she played in for England, including UEFA 2017 EURO in the Netherlands and the FIFA 2019 World Cup in France – both tournaments again ending in semi-final defeats.

“Obviously to lose in three semi-finals was gutting, but we felt our competence was growing and our confidence was growing,” she said.

“Each tournament taught the squad and the players coming through that we were definitely onto something and were building something. It was literally just that last little piece of the puzzle to just try and get us that one step further, because we always knew that we had the players that were capable of doing it, it was just getting to that next point.”

That “one step further” came, of course, in the next major tournament – the UEFA 2022 EURO held in England. Kirby had recently been diagnosed with a heart condition, pericarditis, and hadn’t played for her club side Chelsea for weeks, so feared she might not be fit enough to make it.

She had an oxygen tank installed in her bedroom to help with the fatigue and exhaustion caused by the condition, and she recovered just in time to be included in Sarina Wiegman’s squad: “There was definitely a period where I just didn’t think it was going to happen,” says Kirby.

“And I can only thank Sarina, because she put so much trust in me, that means a lot to me.

“And then to start every game was just incredible. I knew my role, which was important. My job was to work as hard as I could for 60-70 minutes, and then we had the likes of Ella Toone and Alessia Russo to come on and take up the level another step."

Kirby scored two cracking goals on the way to the final, in the 5-0 group stage win against Northern Ireland and then a cheeky chip as England swept aside Sweden 4-0 win their semi-final. In the final against Germany at Wembley, she made way for Ella Toone in the second half and watched nervously from the bench as ‘Tooney’ and Chloe Kelly got the goals that secured the 2-1 win.

“I probably couldn’t tell you anything that happened in the last 40 minutes of that game, because I couldn’t watch most of it!

“As a kid, I used to play football in the garden and pretend I was an England footballer playing in front of all these people. To be able to do that in a final at Wembley and to win a trophy with England, it was absolutely incredible.

“When I started my England career, we were relying on other jobs, training in the evenings, and it makes me really proud to have been a small part of that journey in helping the game grow to what it is now.”

Kirby, who’s now focusing on her club career with Brighton & Hove Albion, is looking forward to being back at Wembley tonight: “It’s going to be nice to watch the girls play China PR, and to be able to say goodbye to the England fans.”

You can read the full feature with Fran in the official match programme for England's game with China PR. Order a copy here.