Lauren Hemp’s footballing story follows the familiar script of those who make it to the top. School lunchtimes were spent having a kickabout with jumpers for goalposts and she bossed it as the only girl on boys’ teams.
For Hemp, football was also a family affair. The England winger – who starred in the superb semi-final win over Australia – honed her craft as a young teenager at Norwich City, alongside her sister, Amy. Her elder sibling was in the age group above her and inspired Hemp to get involved in the sport.
“She would have trained from 5pm to 7pm, and then we’d have training from 7pm until 9pm,” Amy told Telegraph Sport last year. “My mum had to stay there for both of us, so Lauren would be asked if she’d want to stay for our training as well. So she trained perhaps for four hours a night. Even playing two and a half years up, she was still probably better than half of my team. She always used to stand out.”
There was undoubtedly a competitiveness between the two sisters. One summer, inspired by the Olympics, the pair set up various events in their garden, seeing who could run the fastest and jump the furthest.
“When I was about 10, me and my sister used to do our own Olympics,” says Hemp. “It was called the ‘Hemp Olympics’ and we’d go out in the garden and jump over bushes and see how far we could get. We did all these different events and in the end I won, obviously! That was fun!”
Amy’s footballing career was cruelly curtailed by two ACL injuries, but the pair kept a close bond as Hemp continued with the sport. She was part of Norwich City’s Centre of Excellence which was shut down in 2015, to the anger of many in the region.
The closure, which, somewhat ironically, was based on the fact the East Anglian hub was not producing enough talent, was a devastating blow to those like then 15-year-old Hemp, who was already on England’s youth books at the time.
It prompted her return to North Walsham, her local club which she had joined as a seven-year-old. On her second stint, she shone in the under-16 boys’ team.
“She would dominate, even mixed at that level,” recalls Josh Roper, a coach at North Walsham Ladies who used to referee the team’s matches. “Her athleticism was even ahead of some of the boys, in terms of agility and sprint speed. When she beat a few players, some of the boys would look at each other in surprise and didn’t expect her to be so quick and strong and because she was that good, she quite quickly gained respect for managers and the players.”
Hemp might have flown under the radar somewhat during the early rounds at the World Cup but she was at the epicentre of England’s dominance in the semi-final victory against Australia. With 46 touches, 25 out of her 27 passes completed, an assist and a goal, she was key to England’s dominance in the final third.
At school she was quietly determined to succeed. “She was just absolutely hardworking, she would just listen and do whatever you told her to do,” James Lillistone, Hemp’s former teacher at Millfield Primary School, told Telegraph Sport last summer. “Even though she was incredibly talented with her sport, she was exactly the same in sport as she was with anything else. Even though she could probably afford not to listen, she always did. That was always her mentality.”
