Exactly when is unclear, but at some point during the training session, Ana-Maria Crnogorčević hit her boiling point. The Barcelona star had had enough. So she marched over to manager Jonatan Giráldez and delivered him the ultimatum.
“She told him, don’t put them two on the same team again,” Keira Walsh recalls while speaking at a McDonald’s Fun Football session in Rochdale to celebrate the opening of sessions in the Lionesses’ hometowns during the FIFA Women’s World Cup. “And since then, we’ve never played in training together.”
The slightest glint of mischief in Walsh’s smile threatens to bely the otherwise straight-talking walk down memory lane. We’re chatting about her relationship with Spanish midfielder Patri Guijarro and, more pressingly, how that relationship over the course of a single season has blossomed into the type of terrifying midfield synergy upon which Barcelona dynasties are forged, and Walsh blossoming into one of the greatest players in Europe.
There’s no verification for the Lionesses' tale, but it feels so easily believable, it might as well be inscribed in stone outside the Ciutat Esportiva training complex. The Patri and Walsh dynamic has transformed into a tour de force since Christmas, its strength on full show at this year’s Champions League final as the Spanish champions clinched a sensational 3-2 comeback win over Wolfsburg in Eindhoven.
Crnogorčević likely felt a pang of sympathy with her opposition as the Barcelona duo – Patri claiming the Player of the Match award, Walsh claiming the unofficial other Player of the Match award – wrested the match back into Catalan dictates, reducing Wolfsburg to shadow chasers. It’s a scene that’s odds-on to become more ubiquitous as Walsh settles more comfortably into her new home alongside Patri.
An unspoken cognizance is what Walsh boils their dynamic down to. “Some players you just have a connection with,” says Walsh in a manner that risks sounding too simple. Yet, watch the pair for a few moments and a more complex explanation threatens to undermine the silent artistry at play."
“I don’t speak Spanish very well, she speaks English but she’d say it's not great,” Walsh continues. “So we don’t have loads of conversations on the pitch. It’s just that we see football in a similar way. We both play very unselfishly. We both try to keep the game ticking over and it’s more about getting a teammate progressing than ourselves.
“Whenever I get the ball, I tend to look for her. She tends to make things happen, she’s always available and she’s comfortable to take the ball in any situation. She was really helpful in all of the [bedding in] processes, she still is now.”
The fact that the 25-year-old Spaniard will be absent from this summer’s Women’s World Cup due to an ongoing row over the Spanish FA’s employment of manager Jorge Vilda is nothing short of shameful for Walsh.
“If you look at players like that, I don’t see why the federation wouldn’t do everything possible to get the players there,” Walsh says. “It would be a massive shame not to see her on the biggest stage and shining against the best players in the world, and I think for her to finally get the recognition she deserves.
“For me, she’s the best player in the world right now.”
It’s put to Walsh that Patri said similar about her in the post-Eindhoven glow. In fact, plenty of noise has been made about Walsh’s place in that pantheon.
The notion summons a predictable bashful chuckle from football’s reluctant superstar. Of the swathes of official photos from Barcelona's European triumph, Walsh poses solo with the Champions League trophy just once. The former Manchester City star still has to pinch herself when considering her name in the Barcelona midfield canon alongside the likes of Patri and Vicky Losada, Iniesta and Busquets, players she watched in equal parts awe and fierce examination as a young girl.
“I just feel like I’m riding a pretty good moment at the minute” is about as close to braggadocio as you get with Walsh.
To call the remark an understatement would be misleading, though a tickle of a grin suggests even Walsh can’t deny the singularity of her current momentum. Walsh has relished the kind of 11 months that football dreams about: an historic European Championship with England rolling into a world-record move to Spanish giants Barcelona from City.
A trail of titles has followed: Supercopa winner, Arnold Clark Cup winner, FIFPRO World XI, Finalissima Champion, Finalissima Player of the Match, La Liga Femenina champion and Champions League winner.
Walsh smiles graciously at being spared an audible reading of the list. The haul has yet to really sink in, her whirlwind season leaving her with skint time to breathe, let alone reflect, not that Walsh minds.
“As funny as it sounds, I’m actually looking forward to going back to training with the Lionesses,” she says. “I don’t feel tired when I’m there. It’s important to have rest. I didn’t have much before the start of this season.
"I was back in with City after six or seven days of winning the Euros, so that was the period where I felt more tired, but now I feel like I’m on such a high, I could just go back and play football straightaway to be honest.”
It’s good news for Lionesses fans. Walsh’s influence in Sarina Wiegman’s side is inimitable, her pass to unleash Ella Toone for England’s opening goal against Germany in the final a mere augur for the displays to come.
Not that this season has followed a fated script, or at least that isn’t the worldview Walsh prefers. Rather, she considers her present a meticulously crafted product; a lagging indicator of earlier hard work.
“At the start of my career, I think it was the right place at the right time. I think for the young girls now in the WSL it’s really tough to break into a team and get minutes and find that confidence and exposure that I had,” Walsh says.
“I was really lucky that I joined at a time where the WSL had only just started. I had a manager [Nick Cushing] who really believed in young English talent. The confidence he gave me at such a young age, the exposure I had, allowed me to improve.”
At Barcelona, that experience became pivotal, she says, particularly as she struggled to impart herself upon the midfield in the opening months. “I was out of my comfort zone and I wasn’t playing anywhere near my best football. It took me time to settle."
Walsh says her work with psychologist Kate Green, who she credits with helping her reach her optimum at Euro2022 after the fallout from the 2019 World Cup, helped considerably, as did her time under Cushing and her assurance to work with Patri and other experienced players.
“All those things I did to improve myself as a person and a player every day, putting all those little things in place, it all clicked great. If it didn’t, then I was going again and finding the next thing that would.
“It’s not turning up and winning,” Walsh adds. “It’s all those little things in place.”
The mentality speaks to Walsh as a player. An uniquely dangerous football brain, whose vision and intellect in the finer details of the game is often unrivalled but whose willingness to drive further means she is in constant evolution.
At Barcelona, that tenacity came to the fore in the season’s final six months. While the temptation arises to view Walsh as predisposed for success at Barcelona (her infatuation with the Spanish style is well documented), Walsh considers her debut season in Spain a sharp learning curve.
“I definitely built on my foundations while here,” she says. “I’ve always watched Spanish football but really feeling it and playing it, it’s totally different. A lot of Barcelona’s play goes through midfield. That’s something I experienced to a certain level with Manchester City but here, the one-two-touch play through midfield is really central. Playing with the players I do in midfield, I learn off them every day in training and their mentality.
“The speed of thought is so much faster,” Walsh adds. “There were times in the beginning when I’d miss passes or I wouldn’t turn quick enough because I wasn’t used to it, so it takes time.”
Combination play through the middle is something Walsh looks for now more than ever, and something she’s keen to impose with England this summer.
With Walsh on song, England’s World Cup prospects look promising. Walsh acknowledges the injury dialogue surrounding the Lionesses, but she insists they have no reason not to count themselves as favourites.
“I think if you look at other teams, they have some unbelievable players, it’s going to be really difficult but after the Euros we have a right to be confident and a right to feel like we can go there and win it.”
The sentiment is part of a new dimension to the Lionesses, one teeming with conviction and self-assurance as they look to expand the parameters of what’s possible for women’s football in the UK and beyond.
Walsh owes this sharp shift in mentality to Wiegman’s appointment in 2021.
“The biggest difference is the belief and confidence she has given us,” Walsh says. “We’ve always had the ability. You look at the players, it's similar to what’s always been there. It was about finding the right formula to get the best out of us. I think she’s done that in that we’re not just footballers, we’re people.
“I think for me the biggest thing, especially in my position, is that she’s not afraid for us to make mistakes. She encourages it, encourages us to express ourselves. And for me, playing with that freedom really gets the best out of me.”
Self-expression is central to Walsh’s passion for growing the grassroots game in England. As she trains with children at the McDonald’s Football Fun Day, the rise in numbers of young girls is sharp and indicative of the new culture she’s bidding to engender.
“Even just wearing football shirts out in the streets and in the field where I live, so many more girls are playing,” Walsh says. “When I was young, it was me and another girl in primary school who played. To come back to my local community and see a lot more girls involved is really inspiring.”
In Walsh’s apartment in Barcelona sits her FIFPro trophy. The silverware was too heavy to bring back to Rochdale to coexist with the other laurels in her mum’s house. There, Walsh’s achievements have a dedicated section, though most of her medals have found themselves strung on the back of a bedroom door, a collection of oddly polished coats.
“I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell you that,” Walsh laughs, though there’s a poetry to Walsh’s plethora of honours still learning to handle the spotlight. So she is too. “Hopefully there’s more to add soon.”
During the World Cup McDonald’s is providing free fun football sessions in the hometowns of all the lionesses. Off the back of the Lionesses’ Euros win Fun Football saw a 60% increase in young girls signing up, we want to improve on that this summer.
You can sign up now at McDonalds.co.uk/football
