Georgia Stanway believes England’s strength in depth is their biggest weapon going into Sunday’s showdown with Germany.
England have had several match-winners during their run to the Euro 2022 Final, with Stanway scoring the decisive goal in extra-time against Spain in the quarter-finals.
In the semi-final win over Sweden, the Lionesses had four different scorers, while goalkeeper Mary Earps also made a number of vital saves at crucial moments.
The options available to Sarina Wiegman are the envy of historically bigger nations, and Stanway insists anyone in the England squad could be a hero at Wembley.
“It is massive,” said Stanway. “I feel like you could play any one of our players and you know exactly what you are going to get.
“You know that they are going to do a massive job for the team and that is what you need: you need multiple players to be able to step up in those moments and take it. It is almost like being a catalyst.
“I feel like Less (Alessia Russo) has had an unbelievable tournament, Beth Mead can’t stop scoring and moments like that are so, so important, because it puts us one goal ahead.”
The final is set to be played in front of 90,000 fans at Wembley after the few remaining tickets were snapped up yesterday morning, minutes after they went on sale.
Millions are expected to watch around the country, too, and the game could break the UK record for the most watched women’s sporting event in history.
Tuesday’s semi-final reached a peak TV audience of 9.3million, with a further two million watching on streams across BBC iPlayer and the BBC Sport website
It is hoped Sunday’s game could break the previous record TV audience for a women’s sporting event in the UK, which stands at 11.7m and was set in 2019 when England played USA in the semi-finals of the World Cup.
Ellen White told the Lionesses Live show: “It’s just phenomenal, isn’t it? To have grown up with the game with not a lot of people watching to now have 11 million people watching, it blows my mind.
“It just shows how far this game is going and how special this team is. And hopefully it shows how proud we’re making the nation. We hope we can do it all again on Sunday.
“As soon as the final whistle went [against Sweden], I burst into tears. I had to be held by our doctor, cradled by our doctor. I just wanted it so much for this team, because this team is so special. I have been lucky enough to go to many tournaments, but this group is so special. So it was a lot of emotion, but happy emotion.
“I can’t believe it — it’s crazy. I think it’ll take a couple of days to sink in. It’s just amazing, so amazing.”
It is 13 years since England were last in a major final, when they lost 6-2 against Germany in the final of Euro 2009.
Prior to reaching Sunday’s final, the Lionesses had lost in their last three semi-finals. Now they have broken that horrible run, defender Lucy Bronze is determined to go all the way.
“It’s certainly not done yet,” she said. “For players like myself and Ellen [White] and Fran [Kirby], who’ve experienced a lot of semi-final defeats, it’s nice get over those defeats and get over the line and finally get ourselves in the final.
“It’s certainly not job done, though. I think anyone I’ve spoken to before the tournament knows I was always focused on wanting to win the final.
“Now we’ve every chance of doing that. That was a job we came here to do and now we’ve got ourselves in the best position to do that.”
