Lyon defender Ellie Carpenter: ‘I don’t think many people understand how cut-throat it is’

When Ellie Carpenter was 16 she was sledged by an opposition manager. Western Sydney Wanderers were playing away, she was at right-back and the coach was going hell for leather from his technical area. “Who is Ellie Carpenter? She’s not fast,” he boomed as his own player ran at her with ball at feet. “She’s nothing.”

“He was just giving it to me,” says Carpenter, now 22 and playing for Olympique Lyonnais. “Just going at me the entire first half, because I was on his side [of the pitch]. I was just like ‘who is this guy, what is he doing? I’m literally like 16 years old, what are you trying to get at?’”

Chances are he was calling her nothing because he knew she was something. Something very good indeed. And she was fast, with an overlap worthy of water-cooler chat and a purposeful physicality both on and off the ball.

“It kind of just made me play better, to be honest,” she says. “It motivated me more – I just wanted to shut him up. Like ‘OK, you want to bad mouth me, try to get in my head?’ It worked, but not in the way he had obviously hoped.”

In one way or another, Carpenter has been targeted on the football field since she can remember. By the local boys in her small New South Wales home town of Cowra. By Marta and Megan Rapinoe and Lieke Martens. This Saturday it could be Alexia Putellas, when her Lyon side face Barcelona in the Women’s Champions League final.

If Carpenter was a teenaged world-class full-back in the making, she has realised that status as a young adult. These days she is starting for Lyon, the global point of reference for women’s club football. To her left is captain Wendie Renard, the first woman to make 100 Women’s Champions League appearances. Behind her is Chile’s veteran goalkeeper Christiane