I was in pure survival mode but barely surviving at all

The former England goalkeeper reveals how her life unravelled during the Covid lockdowns of 2020 when she turned to alcohol as she struggled without football

- Mary Earps

In early 2020, on the eve of lockdown, Phil Neville, then head coach of England, dropped Mary Earps from the squad.

For the first time ever, I began to feel something unimaginable; I felt disillusioned with football and unsure what I was doing in life, chasing this dream that was constantly in reach but never fully within my grasp. And then, abruptly, lockdown hit. And the world changed, at either the best possible time for me - or the very worst.

My life had been built around a structure for when I trained, ate and even when I slept for as long as I could remember. It was my scaffolding. Suddenly, after rarely ever having had more than a day off at a time, I could do whatever I wanted.

I threw everything I knew out the window and did all of it, in any measure, whenever I wanted, kidding myself that this break from the grind could do me good. I stopped answering my phone, watching friends' and family's names flash across the screen then waited for the backlight to dim as I returned to whatever I was watching on TV.

I barely moved from the sofa, shovelling down biscuits instead of meals, and developed horrific sleep patterns, watching the final episode of The Last Dance, the documentary series about Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls, then looking up to realise it was 5am.

I told myself that I was enjoying making decisions for myself for the first time in adulthood, choosing what I did with my time and what I didn't.

In reality, I was taking the isolation we'd been forced into and letting it do its worst and it didn't take long to realise that this whole situation was a dangerous invitation to demons.