England’s biggest Women’s World Cup wins

English women’s football has a proud tradition of playing against international opponents.

More than 100 years ago, the legendary Dick, Kerr Ladies embarked upon a tour of the United States – although, they had to play against nine men’s teams given the dearth of female opponents at the time.

The criminal 50-year ban enforced by the Football Association was a spoke in the wheel of the game’s progress. In the early years of the Women’s World Cup, the Lionesses scarcely featured, let alone inflicted significant victories.

England didn’t qualify for three of the first four iterations of the Women’s World Cup between 1991 and 2003 but the game has grown rapidly in the last decade. Here are the nation’s biggest victories on the global stage – all of which have unsurprisingly come in recent years.

England didn’t win a knockout match at the 2011 World Cup but they did something that no other nation achieved; defeat Japan. Manager Hope Powell revelled in the “very, very good” performance from her disciplined side but her insistence that: “You’ve got to beat the best to be the best,” didn’t quite ring true.

Japan lost their final group game to England and still went on to win the entire tournament with a penalty shootout victory over the USA in the final. Japan remain the only nation in Women’s World Cup history to lose a match and still lift the trophy.

The all-time leading scorer for England women did not rack up her half-century in meaningless friendlies.

Ellen White’s brace in a 2-0 win over Japan in the group stage of the 2019 World Cup helped bolster her tally to seven goals (from just 11 starts) in the global jamboree, the most of any player in the history of the Lionesses.

Phil Neville had just overseen one of the biggest World Cup victories in England’s history but admitted that he felt “ashamed” after the final whistle.

Several controversial VAR decisions – during the first edition of the tournament in which the video review system was in use – stained a defiant win for the Lionesses. After watching his side implode and lash out at England’s players, Cameroon’s boss Alain Djeumfa decried that there had been “a miscarriage of justice”.

Phil Neville extracted his foot from his mouth long enough to hail Lucy Bronze as “the best player in the world” before the 2019 World Cup. Naturally, he didn’t stop there, brashly insisting: “Write that down, print that, because she is.”

But the former England boss was emphatically proved correct when Bronze battered in the third goal of England’s comfortable quarter-final victory over Norway in 2019.

Fara Williams had been homeless just a couple of years before travelling with England to the 2007 World Cup in China but starred in midfield for the Lionesses, scoring the third in a 6-1 rout of Argentina in the group stage.

Williams was suspended for England’s quarter-final against the US, which they lost 3-0 in her absence.

Argentina must have been grateful that this was their final match of the tournament after opening the campaign with an 11-0 loss to Germany. It wasn’t until Thailand in 2019 that a team conceded more goals in a single tournament than the porous Argentines of 2007.

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