Phil Neville wasn‘t sure what FIFA were thinking when they organised this fixture, but then again, nonsensical decisions in the name of money were part and parcel with FIFA. The idea was a show of goodwill between nations now that travel between the two was being made more accessible, the first ever fixture between the England Women‘s National Team and the USWNT. The match was to be played in Wembley which was also concerning given that 11 American football players couldn‘t fit on the Wembley pitch. While European football used the various nuances of international law to ensure that all players in a match were relatively the same height, even just for the duration of a match, North and South American football, for whatever reason, didn’t use such policies meaning that teams from bigger countries consistently dominated teams from smaller countries. FIFA had later updated their announcement to say that the rules had been altered slightly so that the USA could only play a team of 5 while if the English really wanted, they could put out their entire 18 woman squad. 

For Lionesses captain Steph Houghton, there was nothing to be worried about ahead of the game. Sure their opponents were skyscraper sized but they still outnumbered them 3-1 on the field. And sure the ball they were using was the size of the boulder from Indiana Jones, it was still only the size of a marble for an American. Actually on second thought, that wasn‘t exactly assuring. At least the ball was still light enough to kick like a normal ball, assuming one of the Americans didn‘t crush it under their toe. 

The atmosphere in the English dressing room before kickoff was tense, the players had spent the preceding week building up a siege mentality. They were sick of the media narrative that the Americans were going to literally walk all over them, all the jokes on social media, all the predictions expecting a one sided American win. People were forgetting that this wasn‘t the first time the Lionesses had gone up against larger opposition. They‘d beaten French, German, Norwegian, Spanish and Swedish sides in the past and this time they had a big numbers advantage. Although admittedly, the confidence had taken a hit after an incident that morning. 

As the English bus was pulling into Wembley, the players got their first look at their opponents for the day who were waiting around in an empty parking lot. Out their windows they could only see the legs of the American players, great pillars that alone were the height of high rise apartment buildings. The bus driver suddenly had to slam on the brakes as a foot, longer than the bus itself, 60ft long to be exact, stepped in front of the bus. There was a jolt as two fingers thicker than tree trunks and half as long as the bus itself came down on either side of and lifted it off the ground, the next thing the players saw was the upper half of the huge face of Alex Morgan filling their entire field of vision. Eyes as big as people examined the contents of the bus. The players inside were helplessly thrown about the bus as Morgan spun it around between her finger and thumb to see it from all angles. Then she placed the bus in the palm of her other hand and held it out in front of her so that the occupants could actually see her whole face at once. 

‘Oh my god you are all so cute,’ she said, her booming voice shaking the bus. 

‘Well good luck today I hope you’re ready because we’re going to crush it out there haha’ she said to the English players before setting the bus back down at her feet. The incident was jarring and a bit humiliating but in spite of this, the English were determined to not let it shake their confidence.

Close to kickoff they took to the pitch in front of a capacity crowd at Wembley to find that team USA was already out there‘ and they only had 1 player on the pitch, Full Back Kelley O‘Hara as the rest of the squad watched on outside from an unused car park. ‘Ok so a 18-1 numerical advantage that‘s even better for us‘ thought Man City star Lucy Bronze. That was until they got up close for the shaking of hands, or shaking of pinkies as it were. For safety reasons, the American had taken to the pitch barefoot which helped to demonstrate how tiny the English players were to the yank as most of them were barely taller than her big toe. She crouched down to offer her more than-a-person length pinky finger to shake. As the English were taking their squad photo, O‘Hara decided to photobomb them using just her foot. Even when on it‘s side, her sole still towered over the English, taking up the entire background of the photo. Next up was the pre-match coin toss to determine which end each team would play into, as each team lined up, captains Houghton and O‘Hara (captain by default) both stood next to the Swedish referee. Even though she, too, towered over the English players at over 3 times their height, the Swede was still minuscule compared to the away team. 

The coin toss was won by O‘Hara, whom the ref promptly asked what she wanted to choose. She pondered for a second before a smirk came to her face. “Um, I think I’ll swap ends” she said, then, with no further warning, lifted her foot high into the sky and moved to bring it down in the other half of the pitch, the English players quickly having to scurry out of the way to avoid being squished by her bare foot. O’Hara looked on with a smug expression on her face at the panic her simple act had caused amongst her tiny opponents while her teammates struggled to contain their laughter. 

Ellen White kicked off for England, a one woman tip back to her midfield. Despite the size of the ball it was still easy to get some force behind it. The kickoff was taken to fellow striker, Nikita Pariss. She had intended to play it out wide but felt the ground shake and nearly lost her balance, when she looked out left to where a winger would be all she saw was the immense right foot of her opponent, so she looked right where the other foot came down to impede her view with a similar ground shaking impact, looking straight up she saw, O’Hara looming over her, a smug grin on her face as she looked down on the player in possession of the ball. O’Hara then lifted her left foot over Pariss, the quick movement displacing air and further knocking her diminutive opponents off balance, Pariss looked up to see a giant bare sole up above her. From in her own half O’Hara was hovering her foot above the English midfielder and slowly lowering it down onto her, she figured that her opponent would rather give up possession than call her bluff and risk being crushed. Which was proved to be correct as Pariss wasted no time in rushing out from under where her foot was going to land. O’Hara then dragged the ball back towards her with much more grace than someone her size would be expected to have and launched a kick up the pitch, a shot that rocketed past defenders and into the goal. Carly Telford being almost flattened trying to keep the effort out. The dimensions of the goal had been enlarged (to 10ft x 30ft) to account for the size of the ball but it didn‘t make a difference to whether that was staying out or not. In celebration, O‘Hara‘s teammates leaned over the roof of the stadium to dap up their teammate. From the next tip the English tried passing deep into defense, using their vast numerical advantage to move the ball quickly but O‘Hara just came bounding up the pitch in 1 quick step that shook the entire stadium and knocked the English players off their feet. She reached for the ball once again and like ants from a hill, the English players scattered away from the ball when the ground shook, like cockroaches that scuttled around at the American‘s feet in fear of getting squished. Without missing a beat, O‘Hara blasted another shot into the goal from what was 42 yards out for the English players. After about 15 minutes of this happening on repeat, O‘Hara stepped over the roof of the stadium, somehow not pulling the roof down when she pulled herself over it, as Centre Back Abby Dahlkemper took her place on the field of play. It‘s not like she had an uphill battle or anything, O‘Hara had managed 32 goals in her time on the pitch but she this probably the only chance she‘d ever get to play a match like this with the cameras of the world way him so she wasn‘t going to play easy even if she did have more strength in one foot than all her opponents put together. From the next English tip the players tried to move the ball up the pitch as quickly as possible by having Beth Mead hoof it first time for Ellen White to run on to and it seemed to work, White controlled it and sprinted towards goal wondering why Dahlkemper hasn‘t tried to stop her when she looked up and saw why. When adjusting the dimensions of the goals FIFA has made one glaring oversight. Dahlkemper was easily blocking the entire goal using just the sole of her foot laid out lengthways. Still standing up as to sit or lay down to do so would mean crushing parts of the crowd. When White turned to complain to the ref, Dahlkemper flicked the big toe of her other foot at the ball, knocking it away and knocking White to the floor. She was then able to take it up to the halfway line and blast another shot into the goal flattening Steph Houghton as it went in. The whole sequence of events was hilarious to Dahlkemper, how easily overpowered these inch tall anglos were. Dahlkemper continued to dominate the tiny English players until around the 30 minute mark when she decided to check out and tag Alex Morgan in. Morgan, who had been busy toying with an actual double decker bus, to the terror of the people inside, took a little longer to get on to the pitch. Which the English tried to exploit by taking a quick tip and making a mad dash for goal before Morgan could cover it. Ellen White fired a shot off and as it sailed across the goal line, a titanic foot slammed down on top of it, bursting the football with a loud bang, an even louder thump from the stamp which caused a 1.5 magnitude Earthquake to reverberate in the area around the stadium. When a new ball was pumped up, play was restarted with a drop ball on the American six yard line, contested by White and Morgan, obviously Morgan won it, the Swedish referee dropped it from a height of 15 feet for White and before the ball could even reach her leaping head height Morgan had swung at it with her side foot and sent it arcing dozens of feet in the air up the field. Amazingly, it landed all the way up the other end in the English goal, almost hitting Telford like a meteorite. The goal was a new Wembley record at 99 yards but Morgan had made it look such a casual act. Because it was, while the feat would be almost impossible for an English person, for an American, the pitch was only 4 foot long. 

Morgan continued to dominate for the rest of the first half, scoring a whopping 52 goals on her own, quadrupling the previous single player goals record at international level and bringing the half time score to 109-0, which itself more than tripled the previous record for largest margin of victory in an international game and by half time! At one point Morgan had gotten bored with scoring so easily and repetitively and began to toy with the English players. When she got the ball, instead of trying to score, she would leave the ball by her foot and pick out an English player and hover her other foot over them. When her target inevitably tried to run out from under foot she would follow them, her shadow stalking them like in the anchor toss scene from Spongebob with the judge who couldn’t escape the anchors. Then she would slam her foot down right next to her, knocking her and most of her teammates off their feet as the Americans laughed from the sidelines. Trying to take the ball from Morgan while she was preoccupied proved to be a bad idea as Ellen White found out when she attempted to tackle the American. When she got close enough to the ball to actually play it, Morgan’s big toe suddenly shot out and flicked her over before pinning her to the ground. 

“Nice try, bug” she taunted as she felt the English player squirm beneath her toe. She then fired another shot at the goal that Carly Telford didn’t even bother to try and save. 

While the English went into halftime exhausted and battered from that gruelling first half, the Americans were still fresh having barely exerted any energy in dominating their English foes. Even when on your own, against 18 players, beating a team of less than inch tall people just wasn‘t that hard so while the English players were trying to recover their energy, the Americans sat around and joked about how easy it all was. Picking up English people‘s cars and playing with them, at one stage Megan Rapinoe caught a news helicopter between her fingers, just plucking it with Thumb and index and playing with it as if it were a child‘s toy, just for fun, she tried to see if it fit in her mouth, which it did rather easily much to the horror of the pilots who could do nothing as they were brought inside the American‘s mouth. She closed her mouth, letting the helicopter sit on her tongue before taking it back out again. You might call her actions cruel but she‘d been sick of the English helicopters flying around her head like house flies, at one stage she thought one had flown into her ear.

To start the second half, full back Crystal Dunn took to the field. At 5‘1, it was rare that she wasn‘t the shortest player on the field so she relished the chance to not just be the tallest player on the pitch but the size of a skyscraper and taller than all her opponents combined multiple times over. Unlike her teammates, she wore a sock on one foot as she entered the pitch but not for long as she immediately took it off and placed it over her own goal, covering it entirely. The English players protested but the ref couldn‘t find a rule that said that players couldn‘t either hang their socks from the crossbar or put them in the goal, it just so happened that this sock could simultaneously do both while also completely surrounding it. From kick off she kicked the ball straight into the English goal, unable to stop herself from laughing as English players dived to avoid the rolling boulder the size of a gumball she‘d sent their way. From the next English kick off, Dunn, instead of challenging for possession just stepped right into the middle of the English half, causing another mad scramble of players trying to not get stepped on. As someone who had spent her career being physically dominated she revelled in being the dominant one, in looking down on players running around at her feet like terrified insects. In causing panic and chaos with a simple footstep, in the sight of little tiny people running from her little toe like it might crush them on its own. Some players tried to run up the other end of the pitch to score. Without moving her planted foot, she stretched and blocked off their run with her other foot. On another occasion she blasted a shot wide, demolishing an advertising hoarding and injuring some fans in attendance. When Telford went to take her kick out, she found the soles of two huge feet looming over her. Back at home, Dunn had always had much smaller feet than most of those around her but in England, her feet were a towering 50 feet long. She was able to completely block off Telford from her teammates by sitting down and stretching her legs out. Telford stared up at two soles she was only a fraction as tall as unable to fathom how she could get the ball past them. She tried a curling effort however the ball smacked off of Dunn‘s sole and ricocheted into the goal. Dunn, who‘d barely been able to feel the impact of the ball against her sole, thought the idea that she could score a goal against this tiny team by simply sitting down was hilarious, for it to be just so easy. Her teammates let her have her fun for most of the half but on the 70 minute mark they took her out for the last player they‘d named on their team sheet, Sam Mewis. At 6 ft tall, Mewis was the opposite of Dunn. She towered over her own teammates and much much much more so over her opponents which she emphasised by walking up to the Wembley Arch, which famously towered over the stadium and planting a kiss on it like one might with the badge of their own jersey, at 436ft tall most Americans would even have trouble accomplishing that but she was,in American measurements, a couple of inches taller than the arch. As the English took their first kick off with her on the pitch she stepped over in immediate pursuit of possession of the ball, once again triggering a scramble of players trying to avoid being stepped on. If the English looked tiny next to Dunn‘s feet, they were ants compared to Mewis. By this point they‘d been used to dodging descending feet, each player having experience with almost being stepped on by the feet of the Americans but Mewis‘ feet were a whole new challenge. They were just so much bigger as she shook the earth with each step, casually hunting down the ball, using said feet to isolate Rachel Daly in possession, cornering her between the sideline and her seemingly endless feet. With a flick of her toe she sent Daly flying from where she now stood. The crowd roared in outrage but the ref couldn‘t see past Mewis‘ ankles and didn‘t blow her whistle, Mewis placed her big toe on the ball, turned and faced the English end and flicked the ball goalwards for her first. But repeatedly scoring goals against the opposition who could physically do nothing to stop her became boring to her fast. Taking candy from a baby would‘ve been more of a challenge. Instead she chose to have some fun. The next time she had the ball, she gently rolled it towards one of the English corners. Giving it a little nudge as it rolled out of control before coming to a halt at the corner flag. As Steph Houghton retrieved it, Mewis sat down on the ground a little past halfway on the other end of the pitch, almost crushing multiple English players under her suburban block sized butt, and sat with her legs forming a half diamond together with the heels of her feet touching, going out from each other, trapping Houghton in the corner. Mewis‘ feet each easily cut her off from the rest of the pitch. With her opponent cornered she decided to have a little fun with her. She slowly lowered her lamppost sized finger down towards Houghton who began backing away from her, as the finger continued to descend towards her, she picked up speed and it wasn’t long before she broke into a full on sprint to try get away from the enormous digit, Mewis simply laughed some more at the terror she was causing with just one finger. Eventually the ref blew the final whistle. Putting the English out of their misery as the Americans ran out winners at a score of 183-0 without really breaking a sweat