Jonny Evans was unemployed last July when he decided to call his old team-mate Darren Fletcher.

“I was sat in my house with my wife Helen and thinking, ‘I’m not a good trainer on my own in terms of going out on the roads running’,” the Manchester United defender tells The Athletic. “Maybe the odd run or two over the years when I’ve needed to but without thinking about it, I just thought, ‘I’ll ring Fletch’.

“He answered and said, ‘Let me get back to you’. When I put the phone down, I thought, ‘There might be issues with insurance, for example’, but I just wanted to train and get my fitness.

“Fletch (United’s technical director) called back a few days later and said, ‘The manager has heard that you want to come in. You may as well train with the first team’, so I did. When I went back, seeing all the staff after being away for eight years was the best part of it all.

“From there, the situation progressed daily. There was no intimation to me that the manager wanted to sign me with a contract but the injury situation prevailed right from the start of the season. There’s never been a stage this season where it wasn’t an issue.

“But I’m an experienced Premier League player and I’ve been in many a training session over the years,…

As the Team GB manager at the London 2012 Olympics, Hope Powell left Cardiff’s Millennium Stadium on foot following the 1-0 win over New Zealand in their opening game.

She was, in her words, “mobbed” by fans. In her book Hope: My Life in Football, she recounts spending hours signing autographs and posing for photographs with supporters. This was not normal.

A decade before England’s victory at the 2022 European Championship, 70,584 fans watched Steph Houghton score in Team GB’s 1-0 group-stage win over Brazil at Wembley. Up until then, Powell herself had only played or managed in front of a crowd of a few hundred.

She described Team GB’s participation at that summer’s Olympics — the first time Great Britain had entered a women’s football team despite the event existing since 1996 — as a “major breakthrough” for the sport.

London 2012 was part of the vehicle to increase professionalism and commercialism in the women’s game in Britain. But that vehicle has now stuttered and choked: Team GB will play no part in the 2024 Paris Olympics after England, the nominated nation to attempt qualification on behalf of Great Britain, beat Scotland 6-0 but failed to better…