Then and Now | Shan Turner

STARTING OUT

First team

I started playing when I was around five-years-old and joined my first team when I was seven. It was my dad that got me into it. I just started playing, he took me to my first team, and it just went from there – I haven’t stopped playing since. My first ever team was Marston Green Girls over in Birmingham. I was playing up a year for their under-9s when I was seven, and I was actually a striker back at that point. It was an all-girls team which you didn’t really get back then. You didn’t get many grassroots girls teams, so there weren’t many teams for us to play against. Playing for an all-girls team is all I’ve ever known. I know a lot of the girls I’ve played with didn’t experience that when they were younger and had to play with boys growing up, but I played for that team and then moved to Birmingham City the first year I could and stayed there for 10 years.

First ground

The facilities and the pitches were really basic and the kits were massive. We had our own pitch at the ground where Marston Green Girls was based, so there was a boys’ team and a girls’ team there, but I just remember the kits we had to wear swamping us.

First icon

My idol was Steven Gerrard. I literally adored him growing up, and would watch all his games, whether it was England, Liverpool or whatever, he was the one I looked up to and would spend every weekend trying to find out how he was doing and if he’d scored. I’ve always been a Birmingham City fan, but I did turn myself into a little bit of a Liverpool fan when he was there. I remember going up to Anfield to watch them play and walking into the away end with a bag of Liverpool merchandise and a Steven Gerrard poster. Women’s football wasn’t as big when I was younger, so I never really had any female icons to look up to. You had the England team but they weren’t as major, and the only player that I knew anything about was Rachel Brown because she was the England goalkeeper at the time, so I would look up to her as I wanted to be that good when I was older.

First challenge

Being in an all-girls team the whole time, I had that possibility to play football, which is something a lot of girls didn’t have when they were younger. When it came to playing at primary school, there was a boys’ team and no girls’ team. I was lucky enough for them to let me play in that team, but now, almost every school will have a girls’ team and a boys’ team. Then at secondary school, I’d play with the other girls, but it would only ever be five-a-side. It was never anything major at school, but training twice a week with Birmingham out of school and playing for the girls’ academy, I think I had it quite lucky when I was growing up.

Progression

The women’s game has progressed massively from when I was growing up. The Euros final two weeks ago, with almost 90,000 people in attendance, was incredible. When you look at how many people attended games across the whole tournament, I would never have thought when I was younger that there would be so much interest in women’s football, and there’d be so many opportunities for not only young girls but older females. You don’t have to be young to get into it, there are plenty of opportunities to get into football when you’re older.

CAREER

Best moment

Winning the league. Absolutely. To win the league in the way that we did last season, in the league that we’re in, it was incredible. To go all season only losing one game, and for myself, I kept 15 clean sheets, got goalkeeper of the season for the league, the whole season was a great moment, if I’m being honest.

Best result

When we played Derby at home. We beat them 3-2 and I think that was a really important result for us in winning the league. After that game, it all hit us all that it was possibly going to happen. It was a massive result and for myself, it was probably the best I’d played all season. We knew we had a big week of three fixtures and what we got from those games would see where the league would go, so to come back and beat them having gone 1-0 down after 30 seconds just made everything believe that we could do it now and the league was ours to win, which was a feeling that is so nice to get.

Best opponent

The most difficult team I’ve ever played against was when I was growing up and we played against Arsenal’s Super League academy. We were playing against Leah Williamson and that age group when I was in the academy at Blues, and they were very good. Then more recently, it’s got to be England at the Euros. Even though I didn’t play against them, I was on the bench, and they were incredible to watch.

Best stadium

I’m going to have to say Molineux – despite my own allegiances! I hate to say it as a Blues fan, but how can it not be Molineux. Despite the result, we had just won the league the week before and everyone was still on a high, and we all must have spent an hour after the game interacting with the fans. Playing on the pitch was incredible, but it was that part of it – celebrating the league title in front of 2,500 fans – which will stick with us all forever.

Advice

To never give up and to always work hard. I got to a point where I nearly lost my enjoyment of football, but I stuck at it, set myself goals and I more than reached them this year by going to the Euros. It’s really important to work at what you want to achieve and if you put the work in, you’ll get that in the end. It’s that cheesy thing, ‘Hard work beats talent if talent doesn’t work hard’. Just don’t give up.