Lucy Bronze column: England's Lionesses have plenty of leaders

The Women’s World Cup is now within touching distance and there is one talking point I just cannot get my head around and want to address as we approach the tournament.

We seem to be almost alone in this country in making such a big issue about the national-team captaincy, when in fact we have so many leaders within the Lionesses squad anyway.

Leah Williamson, who led us to European Championship success last year, is sadly injured and out of the tournament Down Under.

So Millie Bright, another Euros-winning player who has just claimed her fourth successive Women’s Super League title with Chelsea, is going to be England skipper in Australia and New Zealand.

Unlike so many other countries, the armband seems to be so important to us in England. But while Leah was captain, she didn’t dictate absolutely everything inside the team.

The image we paint of a captain is almost as a ‘saviour of England’. There was a lot of pressure put on Leah at the Euros and then subsequently, mentally and physically, after it. I feel it was a lot of attention to put on her and Leah was quite lucky she was able to cope with it. We prefer to share pressure as a team generally.

In Millie, we have someone who has even more experience, if anything, than Leah has at international level. We also have Keira Walsh in midfield, who is one of our biggest leaders on the pitch and dictates more of what we do in a game more than anyone else, probably aside from myself.

Whoever is picked as captain – Leah, Millie, anybody – they don’t change, they don’t become Batman by putting on a mask.

Pressure is something we speak about as a group, as European champions going into a World Cup. That’s been the biggest change since last summer.

Opinions about how we will do at the tournament seem to be pretty mixed but we won’t pay much attention to that. Missing some key players seems to have changed people’s expectations of us. Most important for us is the fact we have the confidence of having won the Euros, even if we don’t have Leah, Beth Mead and Fran Kirby in the squad this time.

Sarina Wiegman, our manager, keeps us level and the mindset stays the same as it always has. After all, we haven’t played with Fran or Beth for most of the year and still lost only one game in that time, against Australia in April when we had a lot of tired legs. We said to each other ‘it happens’. That’s football.

We also won Finalissima against Brazil in that period and beat reigning world champions the USA before Leah got injured in the spring. But losing that unbeaten record maybe rid us of something that was absolutely pointless anyway.

It allowed us to focus just on the World Cup after that. These stats – unbeaten runs, goalscoring runs – become irrelevant, really.

The likes of Alex Greenwood may get more opportunities than they did at the Euros but Alex is supremely experienced and has a fantastic left foot, while Millie is probably the strongest centre-half in the world.

Speaking of pressure, Australia will be feeling a lot of that as co-hosts. If people want to call them the favourites for the trophy, that doesn’t change anything for us. I still think you write off the US at your peril. They have lost a couple of matches in the last year but are still the last team I would write off.

All they care about is winning. It comes down to their mentality going into tournaments. We are ready and not worrying about anyone else, only ourselves, and we are in Australia and New Zealand to try to win the World Cup.

Lucy Bronze is an ambassador for Team Kenya, who involve entire communities in gender equality so girls in rural Kenya can create their own bright futures – teamkenya.org.uk

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