Lianne Sanderson remembers how she would “wake up in the middle of the night and just be sobbing.”

A player who had never suffered so much as a sprained ankle was, for nearly two years, grappling with the injury all footballers fear: an anterior cruciate ligament and meniscus tear in her right knee that ruled her out of the Western New York Flash’s NWSL Championship win a fortnight later.

Sanderson was “there, but I didn’t really feel quite like I was there”. Amid the parades and processions, she was embroiled, instead, in something “like a grieving process. Especially at the beginning, I found it difficult to be around my teammates because I just felt like a mess, mentally. On social media, I don’t share all the stuff that happened that was so…”

She pauses. “You’re very vulnerable when you’re injured like that. Where you can’t walk properly, where you’re bedridden for two months. There are a lot of things where you have to swallow your pride. A huge part of my life had been taken away: football.”

During those pain-riddled nights, she would cry on the shoulders of her girlfriend, fellow Juventus midfielder Ashley Nick, who “gave up opportunities to play places to take care of me”. When the Flash relocated, rebranding as North Carolina Courage, Sanderson was cut adrift. She felt alone. “I didn’t really feel like I had much support from anybody,” she sighs, “especially the club I was playing for.” Nick became Sanderson’s literal and metaphorical crutch.