Everything that Fran Kirby touched turned to gold this year. One of the most talked about players in women’s football, the 21-year-old striker possesses the kind of natural, instinctive talent that excites. Reading’s top scorer with 29 goals in 22 matches has the highest tally across both FA Women’s Super Leagues. Impressively, this summer she became the very first player from the second tier of women’s football to secure a professional contract and England call-up, scoring on her international debut against Sweden in August.
But as we discuss an incredible breakthrough year for the forward, there is a more urgent, heartbreaking, tale that Kirby wants to share. Just three years ago Kirby quit football altogether. She left Reading, the club she had been at since she was seven, walked out of an England Under-19s camp, turned down a football scholarship to America and gradually withdrew from life.
Everything became a struggle: getting out of bed, getting dressed, eating. The talented footballer, whom coaches had tipped to be an England star 10 years earlier, was battling severe depression. As Kirby slammed on the brakes and watched her life screech to a halt, everything shut down.
At the age of 14, Kirby’s mum, Denise, the driving force behind her daughter’s football career, died without warning.
Looking out over Wembley, Kirby quietly retells the story of a tragic evening. “I remember the conversation – you know when you just remember the little things?” she says, recalling the night that mum and daughter attended a routine feedback session at Reading’s centre of excellence.
“The coaches were talking about me being psychologically weak, because if I made a mistake in a game it would put me out for the rest of the match. Then my mum said she didn’t feel very well, she had a headache. She put her head on the table and she had a brain haemorrhage.” Kirby stops, and looks straight ahead. “It was just kind of a split-second thing.”
Paramedics were called and Denise was taken to hospital, her daughter and coaches following. For a teenage Kirby, it was difficult to register what was happening. “I was very naive to what was going on. The doctors came in and said: ‘Where’s your dad? Where’s your brother?’ I said: ‘My dad’s at work, my brother won’t want to come down.’ I was young and I didn’t know what was going on. The doctor said: ‘No, you need to ring your dad.’”
The family gathered, waiting for news. Kirby remembers the little things: the special knock on the door to prevent strangers from entering, the “dead-looking” fake flowers in the visitors’ room. “They took us down to the intensive care unit, they said she had a brain haemorrhage. They said it’s less than likely that she would make it through the night so they had her on life support.”
While her extended family – living in Sunderland – travelled to the hospital to wait for news, Kirby spent the night at her best friend’s. The next morning there was a grim silence when Kirby rejoined her family.
“At first no one wanted to tell me that my mum had passed away. Me and my mum were really close. She’d come to all my football games, she was the one who was always there. If it was raining and I didn’t want to go, she’d say: ‘Get in the car!’ She talked about me making it all the way. My dad told my brother, he told all my mum’s family, he told everyone else, he even told my best friend’s parents. All around me everyone knew, everyone was crying. I thought: ‘Oh God, what’s happening?’ My dad told me she’d passed away. I ran out of the room, grabbed my best friend, and started sobbing.”
Kirby tried to put on a brave face. She sang Bobby McFerrin’s Don’t Worry, Be Happy in the taxi on the way home, went to school the next day. She buried her grief. “I’m very secretive about my feelings, very shy. Especially in front of my dad I don’t like being weak. I don’t like crying in front of my dad because I don’t want to make him cry … For the first two or three years I didn’t really show any emotion. I tried to blank it out.”
But it was tough. As a 14-year-old, Kirby needed her mum. “Just little things, like I had to go shopping with my dad to buy underwear. It was awkward for him as well, he’d just stand outside and go: ‘Here you go, here’s the money.’”
Later on they would adapt; Kirby’s dad, a former Sunderland academy striker turned train driver for Great Western who worked night shifts, changed his working hours so that he could be around and watch his daughter play football. He made sure she had enough sports bras. But life without her mum wasn’t the same.
“When I turned 17, that’s when it all got a bit too much. I decided to stop doing pretty much everything. I quit football, I wouldn’t get up in the morning, I wouldn’t go out of my room, I was very depressed.”
Kirby felt guilty, having enjoyed so much of her mother’s time, going to football together, at her brother’s expense –and she also felt angry. “I was angry at the fact that that happened to my mum, but then you’ve got rapists and murderers who live, and they’re just disgusting people. But then that can happen to someone so amazing …”
Kirby’s mum worked as a psychiatric nurse, including a stint at Broadmoor with inmates such as Peter Sutcliffe. Denise would often come home and tell her daughter stories about her workplace, describing how the “hair on the back of her neck would stand up when [Sutcliffe] entered the room, you could just feel what he’d done”. The injustice of the world hit a young Kirby hard. “And the fact that it was so random. She hadn’t been ill. It was just so sudden.”
In removing the pressure of a football career, Kirby was able to find the enjoyment of playing once more. While at sixth form college, no longer attached to any footballing structure, she became a gym addict and began playing for a Sunday team. “I loved not having the pressure. I loved being able to just play,” she says. A year later, rested, recovered, relaxed, she returned to Reading. Her reappearance was ferocious: in her first season back she scored 33 goals. She laughs.
The harrowing emotional journey of a tiny-framed striker whom coaches once assessed as “psychologically weak” has ended, with Kirby now discovering the height of her talents. She says she feels stronger than ever. “If my first touch wasn’t great it would affect me for the whole game. Now I’m more confident. Against Sweden my first touch skied against the bar when I should have scored, and I thought: ‘OK, don’t let it affect you.’”
The England call-up – fulfilling a lifetime aim in making her senior debut before the age of 21 – confirmed she was on the right path, albeit a surreal one. In the dressing room Kirby was surrounded by the same players – Jill Scott, Fara Williams – for whom she had once queued for autographs. Now they are beginning to regard her with similar admiration.
Kirby’s audacious footballing talent, such as that goal against Arsenal in the Continental Cup where she instinctively flicked the ball over Japan’s World Cup-winning defender, Yukari Kinga, and left both dressing rooms wondering: “What the hell did she just do?” has won over her peers.
The challenge now is to cement her place for the World Cup in Canada this summer, in an England side so competitive that even star strikers can be left out by the head coach, Mark Sampson. “That’s my aim right now, to get myself into the best condition I can be,” says Kirby, who gave up eating gluten after reading Novak Djokovic’s book, Serve to Win, on nutrition. “Mark is looking to play me as the 10, but there’s great players in that position – Toni [Duggan], Lianne [Sanderson], so it’s just about making sure I’m improving all the time, and not giving him any excuses not to pick me because he’s shown he’s not afraid to change it.”
In the meantime, despite transfer rumours to the contrary, she plans to stay with Reading, who finished third in WSL2, and hopes to prove that second-tier players can still be part of a World Cup campaign.
If she makes it to Canada, Kirby says it will be a tribute to her mum who invested everything in her daughter’s football career. “Before we hang up our England shirts, Mark always says: ‘Think about who got you to this point.’ And I always think about my mum, always. I dedicate all my goals to her.”
CAREER SO FAR
■ The striker marks her England debut with a goal during the 4-0 win over Sweden in a friendly international at Hartlepool in August and fulfils a dream to make her senior debut before the age of 21.
■ She is currently the top scorer in both FA Women’s Super Leagues with 29 goals in 22 matches for Reading.
■ In November, she becomes the first professional player in the history of Reading FC Women, having joined the club when she was seven.
■ On her return season for Reading after recovering from severe depression she scores 33 goals.