Plot twist

But let's leave Mary Earps to one side for a moment. Let's leave Hannah Hampton and Sarina Wiegman and Sonia Bompastor, and who did what, who said it when.

- Jonathan Liew

Let's talk about you. How do you feel you've conducted yourself during the past few days? How would you rate your words and actions? To what extent do they stack up against your own personal morals and values?

When the time comes to write the chronicle of the Great Mary Earps Book Furore of late 2025 - a chronicle that, on reflection, Earps should probably not attempt to write herself - what will they say of your role? Will they say you carried yourself with dignity and class? Or will they say you spent your time lapping up the hectares of coverage, revelling in the drama, indulging in the discourse, firing off bombs in the group chat, furiously scrolling, expressing blunt and forthright views about people you've almost certainly never met?

This has, after all, been one of the main incongruities of the whole affair. Time and again you hear the view that Earps's new autobiography and the subsequent fallout has been a sad and regrettable episode all round, an unnecessary controversy that benefits nobody in women's football. This is not what we should be talking about, argue many of the same people who can't seem to stop talking about it. Nobody is enjoying this, insist the journalists and pundits and terminally online fans who - weirdly - seem to be enjoying this quite a lot.

And perhaps this has to be the uncomfortable starting point for any discussion of the Earps book, or at least the parts serialised in the Guardian over recent days. We do enjoy this. This is, in fact, the sort of thing everyone likes to see.