Less than four years have passed since the Manchester City goalkeeper Ellie Roebuck, 20, sat her biology GCSE exam in the British Embassy in Minsk while competing at the Under-17 Euros.

For a mark of her rise in the interim, Roebuck is currently the best goalkeeper in the Women’s Super League, finishing the first half of the season with a save percentage of 90.9 per cent. She has conceded just three times in the league and at City has capitalised on the hamstring injury to Karen Bardsley, capped 81 times for England, to become club No 1.

And next? To do so for England.

Roebuck seldom believed those conversations would happen so soon at that 2016 tournament, when she and Manchester United’s Ella Toone would “graft, graft and mess about, like we were back in school for a few hours of the day. We came third, so it wasn’t like we were just there for a few weeks. We had an education officer. Three or four hours every afternoon, we’d just have to revise. It was a bit crazy, but we both passed. I probably did better because I wasn’t stressing so much. I was more stressed that we had to play Germany in the semi-final.”