‘I got consumed by the hatred, by how many people were upset because I wore an armband’: Alex Scott on love, Lineker and standing up for LGBTQ+ rights

A s a child, Alex Scott gathered her Winnie-the-Pooh teddies on her bed. “Am I going to be all right?” she asked them. She loved her teddies, told them about her day, cuddled them for comfort. Eeyore had particular resonance. Something about the way the manufacturers had captured the character’s woe in his downcast expression allowed her to look at him and feel the true depth of his sadness. She imagined the story behind it. It helped somehow as she tried to block out the sound of her father’s tearing rage against her mother in the room next door. “Because I grew up in an environment where we didn’t show love. So, I got that feeling from my teddies.”

I lift my hand to interject with a question and Scott misunderstands this as an unwelcome gesture of sympathy. “No, it’s all right,” she says with a flick of panic. “I hate the idea of people ever feeling sorry for me. Because that’s the thing, I’m OK. I’ve done all right. I’ve come through things. I’m not a victim. I’m a survivor. So, like that thought you just had of, ‘That’s so cute,’ I’m like, ‘No, I’m all right. I’m good today.’” Actually, I was thinking of the way children create worlds to self-soothe, but I am struck by how on guard she is against pity. Alex Scott does not want pity.

On the face of it, she certainly has done all right. Aged eight, she was spotted by an Arsenal talent scout playing with the boys in the football cage, a fenced concrete pitch, next to her council block in Poplar, east London. She was the kid with the cautious smile, known round the estate as “Ronnie Scott’s little sister”. It was 1992, the same year her father, Tony, left, taking everything, including the family television set. She seized the opportunity, took the bus to training