Do you wanna touch it? Go on!” Lionesses captain and Arsenal vice-captain Leah Williamson is poking and prodding around her right knee, egging the crew on to have a feel of the screw that’s holding bits of her leg together. We’re at the photo shoot for this interview and in between looks (Burberry! Calvin Klein! Loewe! Gucci!) she’s pointing out her scars — “one here, another one here” — from the surgeries she’s had to endure after an injury-plagued few years.
This season has been particularly frustrating — she has started just two matches for her beloved club (she came off the bench to join another four). “This season wasn’t good,” she tells me the following week when we meet for a sweaty cup of tea during the tail end of the heatwave at a café near the Arsenal training ground in St Albans. Fashionably on-brand, she’s wearing a black Martine Rose Arsenal kit from the designer’s collaboration with Nike. “There’s bad luck and then there are things that we will make sure we will look out for next year, because this isn’t how it’s meant to be.”
