Arsenal midfielder Lia Walti says their blend of 11 nationalities will pull off shock League Cup win

Lia Walti of Arsenal - Lia Walti of Arsenal  
Lia Walti of Arsenal speaks about their injury crisis and growing up in small town Switzerland Credit: Getty Images

There was Lia Walti, almost two decades before arriving at Arsenal, shuffling across her back garden in her native Switzerland in a pair of skis while her father hunkered over the freshly fallen snow with a kettle.

“The winters were much colder then,” she says. “We were going out with ours skis in the garden to push the snow on the ground, so it would get harder. The whole garden, a lot of work. Then my dad went out every night to put water on the snow so it would freeze. Some winters we had one month where it was possible to go ice-skating in our garden every evening. We had all our neighbourhood there playing ice-hockey.”

A self-described “girl from a small valley in Switzerland” – specifically, Langnau, a municipality between Bern and Lucerne with 9,000 inhabitants – Walti has enjoyed an itinerant 25 years of life, and in July last year made the decision to add London to an odyssey that already included spells in France and Germany. Less than eight months later, she has helped Joe Montemurro’s side to their second League Cup final against Manchester City in as many years.

Walti had yearned to see the world for as long as she can remember. Aged three, the family moved to France, living near Bordeaux while Lia’s father studied and her mother, a former handball player, looked after their children. Lia learned French at nursery there and would return to the country on holiday for the World Cup in 1998, where the fusion of football and culture ignited her five-year-old imagination.

“I remember the final, in a pub in France. I didn’t really understand football but I just exactly remember the feeling: that I was a part of this, in this country.”

Even holidays on home soil were nomadic: bike tours, where they would “take a tent with us, sleep somewhere and then go back the next day. You meet so many other kids, so many other families. You don’t care where people are from – you just play where everyone wants to play.”

Switzerland, undoubtedly, is still home. “Where you grow up,” Walti says, “where from the first minute I feel like home. Just the mountains, the calmness.” There are, however, no camping trips imminent, because “the tent is not my first choice at the moment”.

What does she do instead? “I don’t know the English. Do you say needle?” Knitting? “Yeah, knitting. I’m doing a scarf for my sister. She had already a black one and now she wishes for a purple one. I don’t knit clothes for myself – I never have something I wear after – but I enjoy doing something for someone else and not for myself.”

The team have not received knitted scarves yet, despite “a few wishes, I have not enough time”.

Aged 19, she moved to Potsdam, another casualty of a system where women footballers had to “risk leaving family and friends to be a professional”.

Women footballers are still unpaid in the Swiss leagues, so until prompted by her national team coach, Walti had never thought of being a professional. “Then I had to take a decision, because it’s harder to get better when people have to work 100 per cent next to playing football. After I did my signature on the contract, I was crying the whole night, because I was scared to go abroad alone.”

She was under the spotlight in Germany and after five years received a flurry of offers from elsewhere. England, a fully-professional tier, was “the dream” but so overloaded were her senses that she did not visit London itself for three weeks after arriving.

“Every evening you’re so tired because there’s so many new impressions: you have to be concentrated so much that you understand everything. I had no power to go anywhere in those first weeks.

“But I’m a player who wants to stay a bit longer. I don’t want to leave a club when I’m just here for one or two years. That’s what Arsenal really were looking for.”

Arsenal Women manager Joe Montemurro - She describes manager Joe Montemurro as "the whole package"
She describes manager Joe Montemurro as "the whole package" Credit: Getty Images

She now lives in St Albans, sharing an apartment with team-mate Tabea Kemme, while other players live in adjacent streets.

Arsenal are without seven first-team players – “in November we almost had no subs,” Walti says of their injury crisis – but have remained measured.

The club analysed their training sessions to see if their loads were too intense but concluded otherwise. Walti hopes the club “for the next season should just see that maybe we need a few more players, especially when we’re hoping for Champions League”.

Ultimately Montemurro is, Walti says, “the whole package, something between lazy, focused and very funny. He finds always the right words. He’s our coach, but sometimes he feels like a friend and you can go to him with everything you want to.”

Saturday’s final may come too soon for Walti, ruled out for four weeks following a knee ligament injury sustained late in January. She has never been one for self-doubt – perhaps because her earliest football memories as the only girl on a boys’ team are team-mates who “always had my back if I got fouled, and were a bit more aggressive after that so I didn’t get bad kicks because I was a girl”.

In any case, she has every faith in a squad comprising 11 nationalities, and the blend of so many cultures is in part what keeps opponents guessing. “It is very special,” Walti says. “There are so many players who can change a game. Each country has different personalities and different styles. We play different systems and everyone knows what to do, whatever we play.”

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