Caitlin Foord’s first kick of a soccer ball was in 2004 when, as a nine-year-old, she started to play with the boys in the school playground. She’d never watched a match, but she had natural ability, having played touch footy and competed in athletics. In her first game, she scored six goals and, with the help of sister Jamie, she convinced their mum, Simone, to let her do one more sport. “All the boys’ parents were saying how good I was,” she says. “That’s kind of where my journey started.”

By the time Foord was 12, she’d made the state soccer team. Her mum, a single parent, didn’t have enough money to cover her travel costs so Foord sold Caramello Koalas and Freddo Frogs to schoolmates to raise the funds. “I can’t tell you how much I used to hate it. I thought it was embarrassing to have to sell chocolates,” she says from her home in London. “But at the end of the day, I would have done anything I could to be on these trips.” She remembers, with gratitude, a certain school bus driver. “Whatever I couldn’t sell, he’d buy the rest of the box,” she says. “He was a legend.”