There are still times when Georgia Stanway walks into the Bayern Munich dressing room and some of her German teammates start to sing ‘Sweet Caroline’.
There’s also a curiosity to that, beyond the idea that song accompanied what you might have presumed was a painful defeat for many of the Euro 2022 runners-up.
It is actually one of the rare moments when Stanway really thinks about what happened in the summer at all. There just hasn’t been time to.
The 23-year-old is in Bayern’s academy and – other than talking to The Independent – it’s a rare moment to just sit back amid a relentless few weeks, as she gets used to all the usual adjustments that come with a new country, let alone a new club.
Stanway is actually speaking the day after a session in Ikea, as she finally moved into a new place.
“We finished the celebrations on the Tuesday, and I landed in Munich on the Sunday,” she says now. “It’s been busy!”
Stanway, as she’ll reveal, is all about keeping going. There are quite a few surprising insights when an elite athlete like the midfielder is asked what comes to mind when she thinks of the summer.
The first thing is the very unreality of being able to call themselves champions, to be tournament winners. This, as Stanway notes, is something Friday’s opponents at Wembley – the USA – do. It hasn’t been what England do.
“Every single tournament we say ‘we want to win’, ‘we want to win’, ‘we want to win’… and now we’ve been to a major tournament and we’ve won. I don’t think it will ever hit home what we actually achieved.
“It’s a weird feeling because for the first week you love it, you’re on a high, you’re talking about it all the time, you’re just constantly thinking about it, wanting to experience it again.”
That, however, doesn’t actually mean Stanway wants to relive it.
“Honestly, I don’t think I’ll ever watch the game back. I just want to have the memory. I don’t want to think ‘oh, I had a terrible game, oh I had a good game’, because genuinely it doesn’t matter.
“I actually don’t care how well I played or whether I didn’t play because the result was what we wanted at the end. Maybe not the mindset I should have but, at the same time, it’s done. I can’t change it now, and the outcome was exactly what we wanted.”
She then pauses, and laughs.
“Even talking about it feels weird. I half feel like I’m dreaming, like… did it actually happen?”
England captured the hearts of a nation with their Euro 2022 triumph
It does mean that Stanway doesn’t have too many defined memories of what actually happened for the game’s key moments. Even what she did around Chloe Kelly’s immortal goal is a bit of blur.
There is one moment that remains vivid, though.
“Oh, I remember getting the yellow card – 23rd minute of the game. I remember thinking, ‘this is going to be a long game for me, because I can’t tackle now’. The highest pressure. I remember thinking the worst thing I can do is get sent off.
“I was just conscious of it the whole time, just making sure I was timing things perfectly.”
Stanway enjoyed the celebrations after Euros victory, which included a Trafalgar Square parade
