Players say you can hear it, a sharp crack like a carrot snapping. Was this what Danielle Carter heard after her knee buckled following a challenge on Linda Dallmann last month, her second torn anterior crucial ligament injury - in the same knee - in 14 months?

How quickly did Carter - sprawled prostrate on the field, features taut in a pained grimace, pleading for oxygen - mentally reset the clock? How quickly was the 26 year-old aware it was her ACL, an injury that ruled her out for 267 days last season, leaving her with a patchwork of scars on her left knee?

You would be hard-pressed to find someone in the women’s game who has not either suffered the injury that all footballers fear or knows someone who has. Steph Houghton, Claire Rafferty (three times), Jordan Nobbs, Ellen White. Lucy Bronze’s knee was “completely snapped in half” during her teens.

Oestrogen - a hormone released during menstruation - can increase joint flexibility, which may explain why the number of female footballers who have suffered ACL injuries is so high. In any case, the research has only been taking place for little over a decade.

Carter remembers the recovery from her first ACL injury as “by far the toughest thing that I’ve ever done”. Her first game back was so cathartic that she cried beforehand. She will know that the mental challenge is the biggest hurdle: the hours spent alone, the knowledge that at five months post-op she will still be barely halfway through her recovery.