Three years after Karen Bardsley tore a hamstring tendon off the bone in England’s World Cup quarter-final defeat of Norway it has forced her retirement perhaps a little earlier than planned.
“It needed to be repaired and, unfortunately, the repair and the rehab fell right in the midst of the pandemic; and it just never seemed to be right,” the goalkeeper says. “We tried our best and I just never seem to fully recover. I went for a brief stint on loan to OL Reign [in Seattle] and kind of found a new love for the game again out there. But yeah, unfortunately, the tendon went again and it just never was the same again after that.
