When Chloe Kelly scored the winner for the Lionesses in last year’s Women’s European Championship final at Wembley, it triggered a volley of associations for those watching. Her slight pause before celebrating – in case the referee had found some infraction of the rules – was reminiscent of the 1966 World Cup final, when the players hesitated as the referee decided if Geoff Hurst’s second goal had crossed the line. The Lionesses’ victory was also a belated vindication, coming almost exactly 100 years after the FA had effectively banned organised women’s football. And Kelly’s eventual ecstatic gallop down the pitch – whirling her shirt over her head – echoed the same manoeuvre by the American Brandi Chastain in the 1999 World Cup final, the event that catapulted women’s football into the first division of global sports.
Kelly herself, when asked afterwards about her celebration, cited something with less obvious universal significance: the time QPR striker Bobby Zamora scored a last-minute winner in a 2014 promotion play-off match against Derby County that Kelly, a QPR fan, had attended as a child. And that, explains David Horspool, is how it works. Sporting moments “are attached, consciously or unconsciously, to a chain of historical connections – perhaps more truly a web – which spreads further as you look closer”.
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