This article is part of The Athletic’s series marking UK Black History Month. To view the whole collection, click here.
“You can’t do that.”
Mary Phillip can still hear the words.
They were shouted at the future England captain as she scrambled up trees after her older brothers in Peckham, south London. They were hurled in her direction when she played football in the street, or bowled a cricket ball, or simply ran until she could not run anymore.
The words were never far away. When they hit her ears, Phillip would spin on her heels and demand: ‘Why?’
“Because I couldn’t understand why,” Phillip, the former Millwall, Fulham, Arsenal and Chelsea midfielder, tells The Athletic. “I was never given a reason why, so I figured I would just carry on. That was the pattern I was in.”
For the next four decades, Phillip’s pattern became a way of life.
At 18 years old, she was called up to England’s 1995 World Cup squad. In 2002, she became England’s first female Black captain, wearing the armband after giving birth to her second child. A year later, she captained Fulham to a domestic treble before helping Vic Akers’ famous Arsenal side become the first (and only) English side to lift the UEFA Women’s Cup, now known as the Women’s Champions League, in 2007. By…
