Ellie Roebuck: from taking GCSEs at a World Cup to becoming Super League's best keeper

Less than four years have passed since the Manchester City goalkeeper Ellie Roebuck, 20, sat her biology GCSE exam in the British Embassy in Minsk while competing at the Under-17 Euros.

For a mark of her rise in the interim, Roebuck is currently the best goalkeeper in the Women’s Super League, finishing the first half of the season with a save percentage of 90.9 per cent. She has conceded just three times in the league and at City has capitalised on the hamstring injury to Karen Bardsley, capped 81 times for England, to become club No 1.

And next? To do so for England.

Roebuck seldom believed those conversations would happen so soon at that 2016 tournament, when she and Manchester United’s Ella Toone would “graft, graft and mess about, like we were back in school for a few hours of the day. We came third, so it wasn’t like we were just there for a few weeks. We had an education officer. Three or four hours every afternoon, we’d just have to revise. It was a bit crazy, but we both passed. I probably did better because I wasn’t stressing so much. I was more stressed that we had to play Germany in the semi-final.”

Moving to Manchester City from Sheffield United’s centre of excellence at 15, she repeated this balancing act often. Like all prodigiously talented teenagers, her on-field achievements were always punctuated by the arrival of the next pile of homework and a mother reminding her to get her grades. "But my dad always wanted me to be a footballer, so he was quite lenient.”

Roebuck got by — “I was alright at school, could get decent grades” — but for several years her schedule was manic. Her school provided 15-year-old Roebuck with “day release” every Wednesday to train with City’s first team and on Monday the club’s goalkeeper coach would stay into the evening to give her a one-on-one session after school.

After leaving school, she transferred to Connell Sixth Form College, a 15-minute walk from City’s sprawling Etihad Campus, attending in between training sessions in order to complete a sports qualification.

“I remember eating my breakfast at half eight, running around to college for a nine o’clock start and then running back for ten o’clock to be on the pitch for training,” Roebuck explains. “Then getting a shower and running back across to school, then running back across to do my gym. That was probably the toughest thing, because you just want to be with the girls and I’m running across the astro turf trying to get to school. But now I’ve got that forever. When your career ends, you’ve got to have something [as] back up.”

Her first claim to fame was making the school newsletter in 2016 when selected for the under -17s World Cup.

When Roebuck retires, in roughly 15 years, the landscape of women’s football will be decidedly different from her first memory of it: the 2013 FA Cup final at Doncaster’s Keepmoat Stadium, in front of 4,988. There, she watched her future City team-mate Steph Houghton for the first time.

More significant was the 2015 World Cup in Canada, Roebuck defying the five-hour time difference and going to school the following morning tired but inspired. “Lucy [Bronze] was pretty much the star of that show, so what sticks in my mind is her goals. If I couldn’t make it through the second half, I used to have a nap at half time and wake up.”

She recalls her first day at City: “To come in and see all of the girls that I’d been watching the previous month was pretty surreal, but surreal in that they’re just normal people. I was really shy — I’m not at all now — and tried to keep myself to myself. Steph, Jill [Scott] made sure I was OK, gave me confidence. I found it quite difficult at the start: ‘Wow - I think I’m a million miles away.’”

Bardsley pushed her daily, and Roebuck learnt quickly that she had to develop off the field in the gym and get stronger. "Chris, my goalkeeper coach, was unbelievable. He had that time and patience to push me and give me that boost when I needed it,” she says.

Roebuck has had a dedicated goalkeeping coach since she was seven — quite some development given that one of her England predecessors, Siobhan Chamberlain, was 12years into her senior international career before she had a full-time goalkeeper coach.

Roebuck has just bought her first house, having previously rented with Izzy Christiansen, now at Everton, and Georgia Stanway. She cooks for herself but “still takes my washing home to my mum.”

She moved out at 15, first to a host family in Manchester. “I actually found it pretty hard. It was tough because I didn’t have a car. It was pretty out in the sticks. I’d go from seeing my mates after school every day, probably being out on the street all the time, [to] then coming over here, where you kind of have to think of other things: when you need to rest, where you need to do this. That was a big change, and I’ve always been a massive, massive family person. If I didn’t have to leave home, I’d probably still be living there now. But it set me up nicely.”

The Olympics and the 2021 Euros are always at the back of her mind. “My aim, from being younger, was always to be Enalgnd’s No 1 and sustain that,” she says. “There’s a lot of keepers within the mix. I wouldn’t necessarily say anyone’s got that spot. My goal is to try and secure that place, whether it’s now, for the Olympics - or, definitely, I want to be pushing for the Euros.”