Chelsea and England goalkeeper Carly Telford believes this could be her last Women’s World Cup, after the 31-year-old played in the Lionesses' defeat against the USA in the 2019 World Cup semi-final on Tuesday night.
Telford stepped up in the absence of the injured Karen Bardsley to make her second appearance of the tournament, having kept a clean sheet in England’s 1-0 group stage win over Argentina.
Having made her Lionesses debut in 2007 against Scotland, following the final-four defeat Telford hinted that this could be her final involvement at a World Cup.
When asked to sum up her emotions following the narrow defeat to the world’s number one ranked side, she explained: “Deflated, flat, absolutely devastated. There’s not many positive words I can say right now. For me, the older ones, we’re probably looking at it like maybe that was our last chance to get to a World Cup final.
“You can see that potentially we know this is our last World Cup for a lot of us. If my body holds together then I might make the next one but I doubt it. We know, that’s probably the devastating thing."
England have now lost consecutive Women’s World Cup semi-finals by a scoreline of 2-1 and Telford continued in her explanation of the anguish at again being in touching distance of the final.
"We know how close we were and how close we are to being number one and lifting a trophy eventually. But we’ve come up short again. I think that’s the hard thing. Everything just felt so right for us again but we’ve come up short."
Despite the agonising defeat in Lyon Telford was able to draw positives, pointing to England’s development and future promise.
“What’s happened in the last four years is that we’ve turned into a winning side. Yes, we lost tonight but at the same time there’s a medal up for grabs. We’re going to want it. We’re so proud, we’ve made an Olympics.
"We hope we’ve inspired a whole new generation of kids to pick up an England shirt and want to play football – girls, boys, all over the country. We’ve had some amazing messages and we’re just devastated that we couldn’t go one further. We put our hearts on winning this thing and we’ve come up short.”
“But we’re handing over a baton to an amazing group of youngsters that have done it before and can go into major tournaments with their heads held high.”
