It was a mood-changing moment with transformative repercussions and Jodie Taylor will never forget it. By scoring a fine goal and silencing more than 50,000 extremely noisy Canadians at Vancouver’s BC Place, Taylor set the Lionesses on course to win a first World Cup quarter-final.
Almost four years later the England striker is at St George’s Park, preparing for France 2019 – and, more immediately, Friday’s rematch with Canada – but can still transport herself back to that warm, brilliantly sunny Saturday afternoon a long goal-kick from the Pacific.
Outside the team hotel, deep in the Staffordshire countryside, the sky has turned anthracite but, for a few minutes, it is late June 2015, the nearby ocean is azure and downtown Vancouver throngs with Canada fans as a 54,000-strong crowd head to BC Place, hoping to cheer the host nation to victory.
“I remember it like it was just yesterday,” says Taylor. “The atmosphere was unbelievable, incredible. One of my all-time favourite moments was scoring; it absolutely silenced the crowd. It was unreal.”
With Lucy Bronze registering a second goal before Christine Sinclair reduced the deficit, a 2-1 win swept Mark Sampson’s side into the final four, where they would lose narrowly to Japan before beating Germany in the third-place play-off. Along the way, the hearts and minds of a nation were captured and the landscape of the English women’s game began altering.
Canada travel to Manchester City’s Academy Stadium on Friday, where they face Phil Neville’s class of 2019 in a sold-out friendly with a definite edge. The visitors are anxious to erase memories of Taylor seizing on an awful defensive mistake before surging towards the area, electric acceleration enabling her to seamlessly dodge one marker and see off another challenge before shooting unerringly into the bottom corner. “Everything about that day was unbelievable,” she recalls. “When Canada scored the whole place just erupted. The stadium just shook, it was insane. For us to win was just … wow.”
Taylor, who turns 33 in May, is on a mission to not only prove herself indispensable to Neville but also add a World Cup Golden Boot to the one she won at Euro 2017 in the Netherlands.
Injuries disrupted the Seattle Reign striker’s most recent campaign in the US but on her international comeback in Tampa last month she led the line superbly, creating two goals as England beat Japan 3-0 to lift the SheBelieves Cup.
In 2015 Taylor was fresh from knee surgery on a torn meniscus and barely half-fit but Sampson still took her to Canada after identifying her pace, movement and finishing as integral to England’s chances of success. With competition for places now more intense, she has not seemed quite as central to Neville’s thinking but recent indications suggest he, too, has been won over by her talent. Tellingly, England’s coach described her performance against Japan as “phenomenal”.
“Four years ago I’d just had surgery, I didn’t know if I’d be selected for the World Cup and, even when I was, I had no idea if I’d even be able to play,” says a player who has scored 17 goals in 38 England appearances. “It’s crazy to think I managed the whole 90 minutes in Vancouver but unfortunately I was having to play catch-up with my knee, so to be fully fit now is so important. Looking back from that World Cup to this one you think about how far we’ve come as a team, how we’ve really grown.”
Canada, too, have evolved, with their former coach, the charismatic, Consett-born John Herdman, now managing the men’s side and Kenneth Heiner-Møller having taken over, but Taylor is not about to underestimate the Dane’s squad. “They’ve got a really good blend of experience and youth and they’re well organised,” she says. “I’m sure Canada have got what happened in Vancouver in 2015 at the back of their minds so it’s going to be a hard game, a big test. But these are super‑exciting time for us.”