England World Cup star Ella Toone is the Lionesses’ Wayne Rooney… raw, unglamorous,

On the day the England team re-assembled last autumn, reflecting on the acclaim that had followed their European Championship glory in summer of their lives, they shared stories about the new-found attention which success had brought.

Beth Mead had just appeared in a magazine photoshoot, wearing a Prada sports bra and shorts and designer shoes. Chloe Kelly had modelled a beautiful red ball gown. 

Ella Toone described how she’d been ‘paparazzied’ eating a pasty outside a bakery in Tyldesley, near Wigan. The room dissolved into laughter as she said this. 

Lotte Wubben-Moy, the centre half, had to explain to Wiegman what a pasty actually was.

That really was Toone all over. The individual who, often unintentionally, will provide the comedy gold in this squad. 

But also the blunt, unglamorous one from a former mill town, whose boyfriend plays for Stalybridge Celtic, in the Northern Premier League Division One West.

That boyfriend, Joe Bunney, was browsing around the Rocks area near Sydney Harbour on Thursday morning, hours after Toone had fired England into the World Cup final, though it wasn’t the high-end places for him, just a shop selling replica Ugg boots and then the Bakers Oven breakfast place.

If you were making a comparison with the England men’s teams of old you might say that Toone is the Wayne Rooney of this squad – a raw, uncomplicated working-class player, most at home in Tyldesley, in the borough of Wigan, as Rooney was in Croxteth. 

One of her close friend Alessia Russo’s interviews after the Euros final took place in her brother’s flat, overlooking Tower Bridge. It wouldn’t have been Toone’s natural domain.

She has a street-player’s instincts, too, and plays with a different picture in her head to others. Her volleyed goal against Australia, both feet off the ground after she had despatched it, full force, showed that. Her goal against Germany in last summer’s was in that bracket, too.

When Rooney was displaying this kind of capability for Everton, 20 years ago, Manchester United couldn’t wait to sign him up. 

‘Tooney’, as she is inevitably known, was in United’s own back yard for six years, scoring goals for the club’s girls’ teams. But they had no women’s team. 

The club took the view that the entire football focus should be the betterment of the men. 

So she left for Blackburn Rovers, training at a remote, spartan spot called Blacksnape, 80ft up in east Lancashire moors.

Local paper reports are littered with Toone’s feats from her five years at Blackburn, including six goals as Rovers beat Rotherham United 19-0. 

She became an England under-19 international yet United, a club whose fortunes she lived and breathed, were not an option. 

She signed for City before the advent of a United women’s side finally took her to the fields of Carrington, a stone’s throw from Partington – the unprepossessing west Manchester district where she would sometimes socialise.

There was generally a reaction when the schoolgirl Toone or her Blackburn team-mate Georgia Stanway pitched up to play for Rovers on some windswept pitch. 

‘Word had got out about them being England youth internationals,’ says Gemma Donnelly, who worked with her there. 

‘Other players might kick her but they generally could never get a reaction.’

The 23-year-old is self-deprecating, right down to her jokes about the comment she made after England lifted the trophy last summer – ‘I’m absolutely buzzing me head off!’ – which spawned hats bearing those words, sold at a pub in Tyldesley.

An interview she gave here a few weeks ago, about how she’d ‘discovered’ herself in Australia, reading books like Jamie Vardy’s autobiography and walking on the Terrigal beach when she couldn’t sleep, was classic Toone: dry, funny stories, told against herself. 

‘I don’t actually read novels, just autobiographies and they’ve got a few pictures in, so that helps!’ she said.

And now, having helped England reach the final, she finds herself at the centre of the biggest decision Wiegman must make ahead of Sunday’s final. 

Whether Toone retains a starting position or makes way for Lauren James in the No 10 role, after her return following suspension.

The robust response Keira Walsh gave late on Wednesday night here when asked about James returning hinted at how defensive of Toone some of this team are. 

They seem to feel she should not make way for the Chelsea player, whose dismissal shattered the calm which Wiegman had built around the squad.

‘I think obviously people are going to speak about that,’ Walsh said of James’ availability. 

‘But I think everyone has got to give Tooney credit. She has come back in and she has done an unbelievable job again. 

‘People probably won’t speak about it too much, but it’s not easy to come in for a quarter-final or semi-final when all the spotlight has been on the player’s place you are taking. 

‘I think [against Australia] she was unbelievable. She tackled, she got stuck in, she took us up the pitch, she gave us a lot of security. 

‘LJ (James) is a massive talent, but I think we have got to put some respect on Tooney’s name as well.’

Toone has not made the impact England would have expected at this World Cup and Wiegman, who is not a sentimental manager, may opt for James. 

But there was a balance to Wednesday’s display that some managers would not want to tamper with.

Wiegman also knows all too well the impact this player has had from the bench against Spain once before. 

When England were six minutes away from defeat to La Roja in last summer’s European Championships quarter-final, Toone bolted to meet a ball Russo had nodded to the back post. 

Those looking on from the bench instinctively knew what would happen next. 

‘When I see Tooney running, it’s like my body knows what is happening before my mind does,’ Beth Mead related in her autobiography. ‘The net bulges and Tooney slides to her knees.’

Toone uses visualisation techniques before matches to ‘manifest’ goals, as the sports psychologists call it, though Toone – being Toone – doesn’t take herself very seriously when describing the process. 

‘I’m quite a big manifester,’ she said in that interview a few weeks ago. ‘I manifest a lot of things before I play games and half of them never happen.’

Mead was also a substitute when Toone scored against Germany in the final. 

‘I watch her track the flight of the ball and cushion it down,’ writes Mead, who had also been substituted in that game. ‘With her second touch, from my view from the side, I’m waiting for the net to ripple. I watch the ball dip and settle in the corner.’ 

This is precisely why Toone has trenchant backers in the England squad.

The heart-broken Australians were counting the cost of her goal. 

The country’s Daily Telegraph – renamed the Daily Tillygraph all week because the Matildas are known as ‘the Tillys’ – reverted to its usual masthead and reluctantly carried an image of a jubilant Toone on its sports pages.

If, and when, the moment comes and England make history, three days from now, Toone will probably be looking for nothing more than a way of inspiring some new lines in hats, back in Tyldesley. 

After Germany were put to the sword in last summer’s final, she wore a blue, yellow and red one with a propellor on top. 

‘It was instinctive. I didn’t pre-plan it,’ she said, encapsulating, in those few brief words, what she brings to England.