In football, there are confidence players, those who are excellent when they are in a good place but difficult to watch when they are not. How good these players are when they are on top form makes it tougher to watch them when they are not, because the talent and the magic in their boots hasn’t disappeared forever – it just needs to be rediscovered. Ella Toone, the Manchester United and England star, is one of these players and, sadly, that confidence seems to have gone missing lately.
To watch Toone in full flow is to watch a game-changing attacking midfielder pick apart a defence. The 24-year-old is brilliant at occupying spaces from which she can seriously hurt an opponent with the passes she can play or the way she can shoot from various positions. She’s a very good footballer, there is no doubt about that.
But we’ve not seen Toone in full flow for a while. Right now, she cuts a frustrated figure, one for whom the ball just doesn’t bounce right, whose touch betrays her more often than usual and whose defence-splitting passes aren’t coming off like they used to. More worryingly, games seem to just pass her by at the moment.
Whether for United or for England, examples of her brilliance have been few and far between in recent months. But what is wrong with Toone? And how do club and country help get her back to her best?