Alessia Russo banished all fear with the cheeky backheel that ripped Sweden | Women’s European Championship 2022
LAlso, we’ve all tried it. The skill itself is not the point. Everyone who has ever kicked a football at any level has at some stage tried the cheeky backheel that Alessia Russo ripped apart the Sweden defense with at Bramall Lane on Tuesday night. It’s a staple of playground kickabouts, five-a-side games and pre-match warm-ups across the world. And yet there seems to be an unspoken acceptance that as you travel up the ranks, such rudeness is ultimately left behind, for fear of waste and inefficiency, for fear of embarrassment, for fear of how it might look to anyone watching.
Fear is one of the most underrated aspects of elite football. This is why wingers try to squeeze in a cross instead of taking on a defender. This is why defenders kick the ball free instead of taking a pass through the lines. That’s why moments of genuine inspiration are so rare at the top level. And the greater the stakes, the greater the amount of failure. Aversion to risk is what makes us human. And so when Russo collects the ball in Sweden’s penalty area with 22 minutes to play in the European Championship semi-final, pretty much the last thing anyone expects her to do is what she actually does.
As a thought experiment, let’s imagine Russo tries the backheel and it doesn’t go off. It deflects off her foot or hits one of the two Sweden defenders following her, and bounces harmlessly clear. Worse, let’s imagine that Sweden wins the ball back, works it up the pitch, creates a chance, scores to reduce to 2-1. Maybe they even go on to win and break England’s hearts. Perhaps Russo, who seconds earlier had just missed a golden chance to make it 3-0 to England, now becomes the lightning rod for a grieving nation’s anguish and anger.
The phone lines of two-bob radio talk shows light up with fury. Russo’s backheel becomes an emblem of complacency and decadence for this English team, perhaps even English entitlement and arrogance. This, whether she’s aware of it or not (and of course she’s not), is the risk/reward scenario that Russo takes on when she takes on the shot. And if all this seems a little far-fetched in the morning-after glow of a resounding 4-0 triumph, is it more far-fetched than what really happened?
Now let’s take a moment to consider Russo himself. She is 23 years old and has already played for five clubs. She started out in the Charlton academy before being snapped up by Chelsea, where she played under Mark Parsons, now the Netherlands manager. She was captain of the development side. At the age of 17, she made her debut for the first team. As the Emma Hayes era quickly took off, Russo was clearly primed for a starring role in one of English football’s great dynasties.
Instead, she left. She dropped a division to Brighton: a smaller club with a sparser set-up but one that could offer her immediate first-team minutes. In the summer of 2017, she moved on to the Tar Heels of North Carolina again. Her highlights from her time there include a catalog of pure filth. There are mean steps and bold shots from distance; feints and sole rollers; match winning goal.
Against Wake Forest, she swoops in on a cross, sells an outrageous dummy to the keeper and finishes in an empty net. Against North Carolina State, she gets the ball 40 yards out with her back to the goal, sends a defender on a snack and a soda, turns away from two more and whips home from distance. Then in her sophomore year, again against Wake Forest, she finds herself one-on-one with the goalie and decides to try a naughty little drink. She plants her standing foot and the keeper clears it, a hard knee smashes into a hard shin and breaks it at the base. She won’t play again for six months.
The portrait that emerges from these early years is of an exuberant yet ruthlessly impatient talent: a young woman who knows exactly how good she is, chilled only by the goal and the fastest way to get there. If you are in her way, she will get rid of you. Nothing personal. If she doesn’t like the new contract Manchester United is offering her, she rejects it, as she did last month. And for all her sublime technique and vision, there is little showy or showy about any of this. The skills and tricks, the unsentimental comings and goings, the contract distances, are simply the quickest solution to the problem before her.
And so as she evaluates her options Tuesday night, she’s not thinking about the shot she just missed. She doesn’t think about what Colin will say on Twitter the next morning. She doesn’t think about the time she tried a rude little movie and got a broken leg for her trouble. She doesn’t think about the fact that this is an EC semi-final. There’s a ball, there’s a goal, and all she cares about is the shortest path between the two.
A confluence of factors is required to achieve such a goal. A culture of empowerment and expression, where forces like external judgment and fear of failure simply don’t cut through. A coach who encourages players to live instead of just exist. And of course, being 2-0 up helps. But most of all, it takes a woman with Russo’s unbridled skill and unyielding will: a woman on the biggest stage of her life and afraid of absolutely nothing.