Four minutes into Ellie Brazil’s Charlton debut, the moment came. It was a tap-in from inside the six-yard box, but who cares? Brazil thrust her arms by her side in celebration and jumped with glee. This meant more than any ordinary goal. It was the former England youth international’s first competitive goal for more than five years, after fighting back from not one but two anterior cruciate ligament injuries.
Brazil had endured the cruel misfortune of separate injuries in each leg, first when playing for Brighton in November 2019, then with Tottenham in October 2022, but has a remarkably positive mindset. Of what it was like in the summer when looking for a club, the 25-year-old says: “I had the status on my head, I can’t deny it: ‘Ellie’s done two ACLs, she hasn’t played for a couple of years.’ So it was really difficult to find the club that sold it to you and made you feel like they really wanted you. There were less than a handful of clubs. I had conversations with the clubs and Charlton just stood out to me. I heard opinions from the girls here and they’re only positive.”
Charlton’s faith in Brazil was rewarded with three goals in her first two games, helping last season’s Championship runners-up win four of their opening seven games to sit two points behind the leaders, Birmingham.
“I’m very grateful Charlton have given me the ability to get minutes and gain confidence. Neither of my two ACLs had scored a goal yet, so it was a new one for them both, and they’ve both scored now so fair play to both knees! It was a lovely feeling.” Brazil had last scored in Brighton’s 4-0 victory at West Ham in the Women’s Super League in May 2019.
Brazil, the daughter of the former Fulham, Newcastle and Preston forward Gary Brazil, was part of the England youth setup from an early age and played for Fiorentina before joining Brighton. She says of her knee injuries: “My first one, I was in pain but I played on because I was unaware of what an ACL was. I didn’t really know what the three letters meant; they weren’t really ‘around’ at that point, compared to now. I lasted about a minute longer, changed direction and I couldn’t change direction.
“With the second one, knowing what I’d gone through brought so much more fear and panic to me when I hit that floor. It was just instant fear, that the same cycle was going to happen. But I couldn’t be more grateful to Spurs and their medical team. They’re incredible. They’ve become proper, lifelong friends. So I will forever support the Spurs girls. But it wasn’t plain sailing. It’s tested my resilience. It has tested how much I love the game, but now I still have a lot of passion for it, probably more than I’ve ever had, because I know how it feels to be on those sidelines.”
Brazil also knows exactly how it feels for others going through the rehabilitation. She saw her teammate Mia Ross sustain an ACL injury in September and says: “Watching her go through it was very emotional because I knew what she was in store for. I just want to make sure that, if I can help in any way, that will be a role of mine this season, whether that’s just to make her laugh, have a coffee with her, brighten her day, because it does get doom and gloom.”
ACLs have plagued the women’s game for years and been in the headlines in recent seasons with more and more players calling for further research. On Thursday the Leicester striker Noémie Mouchon’s ACL injury was confirmed by the WSL club. Discussion continues as to the reasons why women are more susceptible to this injury, statistically, but Brazil is very measured, saying: “We don’t know the answers yet. A lot more research and everything that’s going on currently is brilliant, so maybe one day we will get the answer, but right now we don’t know. People say: ‘I think it’s because of this, I think it’s because of this,’ and I’m like: ‘You’ll never know, though.’ I try not to punish myself about it, of things that I might have done in the lead-up, or stress in my life in the lead-up, because I’ll never know the answer.”
Thankfully, she is looking only forward with Charlton. They narrowly missed out on promotion last term, which Brazil says was another motivating factor behind her move to Karen Hills’s team: “The fact they lost by one point last year, they have that blood-boiling feeling in them. I wanted to be part of that. I quite like that ambition.”
That desire was apparent in Charlton’s most recent league game, a 3-3 draw at Newcastle where they scored twice deep into stoppage time, with Brazil providing the assist for the 95th-minute equaliser. “We have a mentality and a desire, that we will not give up until that whistle goes. It’s hats off to the management for probably drilling that mentality into us in training sessions every day. But the other side of it is: ‘We’re not happy with our first-half performance, we’re winners and we can’t keep doing what we did in that first half if we want to get somewhere in this league.’
“[This season] we just want to be in contention to win the league by the time we come back [from the winter break] in January. We just want to be there or thereabouts so we can then hit the second half of the season really hard, and see what can happen.”
