\n<\/p>\n
There are a lot of conflicting thoughts in the mind of Lucia Kendall, the 22-year-old Aston Villa midfielder whose first season in the Women\u2019s Super League went so well that she was called up to the England squad by Sarina Wiegman within weeks of it starting. One minute, she is talking, unprompted, about next summer\u2019s World Cup. The next, she is admitting that it has still not sunk in yet that she is a fully-fledged Lioness.<\/span><\/p>\n That summarises Kendall\u2019s 2025-26 season quite well. After all, it really was a whirlwind. In July of last year, she joined Villa from Southampton, the WSL 2 club for whom she debuted at the age of 16 and played regular senior football with for five seasons. In October, exactly a month after her WSL debut at Villa Park against Chelsea, she was named in a senior England squad for the first time, granted her full debut two weeks later against Australia. <\/span>She was named Player of the Match<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n If that wasn\u2019t surreal enough, Kendall returned to Southampton on the Lionesses\u2019 next camp and <\/span>scored at St. Mary\u2019s in the victory over Ghana<\/span>. The midfielder\u2019s performances in those friendlies were so good, even, that she was in the line-up for Spain\u2019s visit to Wembley in April, in World Cup qualifying. England won 1-0.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cCrazy,\u201d Kendall replies, as <\/span>GOAL<\/strong><\/b> asks about all the milestones in a season that also saw her start 16 of Villa\u2019s 22 WSL games, in her first year at the level. That would be a headline in most cases, but it is almost relegated to a footnote in Kendall\u2019s last 12 months, such has been the quantity of notable moments. \u201cEven now, I look back on it and I can\u2019t really take it all in,\u201d she concedes.<\/span><\/p>\n But as the 22-year-old looks ahead to her second season in the WSL, one that will be followed by <\/span>the 2027 Women\u2019s World Cup in Brazil<\/span>, there is no indication that she has been over-awed by all that has taken place. Quite the opposite, in fact.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cI think playing for England really opened my eyes to like, ‘Wow, this is what I’ve dreamed of’, and I think it almost relaxed me,\u201d she says, incredibly. \u201cIt was almost like, ‘I’ve done it. This is what I’ve dreamed of, so let me just go and enjoy it’.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are a lot of conflicting thoughts in the mind of Lucia Kendall, the 22-year-old…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":25459,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sport"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/25459"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/playball.com.ng\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}