Aston Villa’s Lucy Staniforth: ‘I’d be lying if I said I’m not thinking about the World Cup’

A s Lucy Staniforth left Manchester United’s training ground for the final time a nagging voice inside her head suggested she might be about to step off the edge of the world. Fast forward three months from that watershed January moment and the midfielder, now at Aston Villa, feels on top of it.

“When you’re at Manchester United it seems like the best place on the planet and anywhere else is never going to quite live up to it,” she says. “But everything that’s happened since leaving has surpassed my expectations.”

The success of her adaptation to a new, deeper role, anchoring midfield for Carla Ward’s upwardly mobile side, has not merely silenced those inner doubts but re-kindled the 30-year-old’s case for an England recall for the World Cup in Australia.

More immediately, there is an intriguing double header against Chelsea to look forward to with Villa at home and hoping to extend their seven-match unbeaten WSL run on Sunday before facing the same opponent in the FA Cup semi-finals on 16 April.

Staniforth has played a key role in Villa’s rise to fifth in the WSL with her performances leading to questions as to why she enjoyed limited game time at Manchester United. “I made friends for life there,” she says. “But Marc [Skinner, United’s manager] and I had a conversation and Marc made it clear he was happy to let me leave.

“If you’d ask me six months ago how I saw my future, I’d never have imagined things working out so well.”

Reunions with her old friends Jordan Nobbs and Rachel Daly have proved welcome bonuses. “Me, Jordan and Rach have known each other for 14 years so it’s been lovely,” she says. “It’s made everything so easy. It’s felt like we’re rolling back the years. It’s fun.”

Nobbs’s father, Keith, is a former