Mary Queen of Strops dishes it out in her new memoir – but can’t take it

The attention garnered by the serialisation of ‘All In’ over the weekend has been feverish. The chosen extracts saw Earps take aim at current England first-choice goalkeeper Hannah Hampton and manager Wiegman, as well as discussing her sexuality and her battle with Nike to sell goalkeeper shirts.

Reading the excerpts might give the impression that Earps was simply taking us through the narrative and challenges of her career, but in fact we are being granted wisdom via the medium of chapter titles. Whether it is that ‘Uniqueness Is To Be Celebrated’, ‘What’s Meant For You Won’t Miss You’, or ‘Self-worth Doesn’t Require Others’ Permission’, no story from her career is to be consumed without a life lesson.

Of course because this is a hackneyed editorial technique, which marries well with Earps’s own TikTok-fuelled persona of being ‘unapologetically’ herself, there is little insight to be actually gained. That is because it is apparent that Earps is yet to actually manage to do that herself.

Her approach to the Hampton situation exemplifies this. Earps has obviously been taken aback by the response to her accusations that Hampton’s behaviour ‘frequently risked derailing training sessions and team resources’.

“It’s been really overwhelming to see how some things have been distorted a little bit,” she said in an interview with BBC Sport as she processed the weekend’s events. “I’ve not written this book to tear anyone down in any shape or form.”

In another interview with the Sports Agents, recorded prior to any of the book being made public, she refuses to talk specifically about Hampton because, she says, she does not want to be negative about individuals.

It is hard to marry this with the actual content of the book which has not been taken out of context despite Earps’s insistence that that must be the case. She accuses Hampton of being “disruptive”, “unreliable”, and claims that there wasn’t a camp without “incident”. There is no further detail on what the behaviour was, leaving the reader to think the worst, with the accused unable to comment herself for fear of inflaming the situation. Earps’s own maturity about the situation shines through in her continued reference to Hampton not by her name, but as her “competitor”.

Earps is right that the book does discuss other, important topics. She writes movingly about her experiences of being bullied at secondary school and her struggles with disordered eating. Perhaps the most interesting subject is her relationship between her sexuality and her family. Discussing her relationship with her girlfriend, Kitty, Earps reveals that when she had previously dated a woman, her parents had not approved. The effect this had on Earps feels particularly stark when she revealed she did not bring her partner to the Euros-winning after-party because she did not want to mix ‘business’ with her ‘personal life’. It seems the tension with her parents came to a head at the 2023 World Cup when Kitty overheard them saying ‘hurtful things’ about their relationship.

This conflict and the difficulty that has come with it is the most interesting aspect of the book but before it can be absorbed, the reader is quickly learning a new lesson. “Pressure and turmoil can feel overwhelming, yet they can also bring out strength we didn’t know we had,” Earps writes. It is hard not to feel that all of this is still too raw for Earps to truly process, in the same way as her discussion of her sudden retirement from England six months ago also is.

The temptation to mock Earps is hard to resist given some of what is included in the book. She lists being the first female professional football player to receive a Madame Tussauds waxwork as one of her ‘cultural honours’ – it’s below her MBE, but above the ‘World Football Summit Gamechanger Award’ – and informs us that she was in the gifted and talented Spanish class in year 9. Plenty on the internet have commented on the Trumpian tone to her statement that her World Cup final save ‘had been viewed as heroic, and even, perfect’. It is almost outdone when she explains she ‘felt a real affinity to the Queen’.

Yet there is also a sadness when she reveals that Wiegman warned her of what her retirement might do to her reputation, particularly given what has since unfolded through her criticisms of the manager and her successor in the England goal. It is hard to countenance how those around Earps, including her much-mentioned manager Tina Taylor, allowed her to go down this road which looks only more humiliating with every passing interview.

“I knew never to make a big decision when emotion was the dominant driver,” writes Earps in reference to her choice to retire from international duty. One wonders why she didn’t apply that knowledge to writing this book.

Photography by PA