How Northern Ireland's historic Euros victory is already inspiring girls into football

Northern Ireland’s most capped player, Julie Nelson, said her club was “inundated” with messages from girls wanting to take up football hours after the team qualified for Euro 2022.

Kenny Shiels’ part-time outfit, ranked 49th in the world, made history by sealing qualification for next year’s championship, their first major tournament, with a 2-0 victory over Ukraine on Tuesday night.

The win was all the more memorable for Nelson given that the match took place at Belfast’s Seaview stadium, the home of Crusaders Strikers, the club where she has spent the majority of her career.

The 35-year-old, who will return to her day job at Ulster University’s sports centre on Thursday, said the momentous occasion was “the icing on the cake” of her 17-year international career, adding that it was already inspiring the next generation of female footballers in the country.

“I was speaking to one of the girls from my club earlier on today and she said they’ve been inundated with messages this morning about girls wanting to take up football, so that’s just incredible to hear already,” Nelson told Telegraph Sport. “We hope through this journey into the Euros next summer that that continues to happen and that we can continue to be an inspiration for those girls coming through.”

Nelson earned her 115th cap for her country in the historic win to continue a fairytale journey which began in 2004 against Portugal in the Algarve Cup. That match was the first Northern Ireland women played after being disbanded at the turn of the century,

When asked whether the team’s achievement could help unite the country amid some of the worst riots Belfast has seen in recent decades, Nelson said: “I think our team is helping to do that. Thankfully it [the unrest] has settled down a bit this week so hopefully that continues going forward. To be honest, it wasn’t a focus of ours. We knew we were safe basically and it wasn’t going to cause us any issues, we were focused on the job we had to do.”