Man City’s Mary Fowler on finding her identity outside football: ‘I love having a laugh’
Mary Fowler momentarily looks down and holds up a very neat yellow square of knitting to the camera, two wooden needles poking out either side.
The Australia international is making a scarf, having been recently taught by her Manchester City team-mate, third-choice goalkeeper Katie Startup.
“I thought, ‘This is great’, because I wanted to make my own clothes,” says Fowler, speaking to the morning after City’s 2-0 quarter-final first-leg Champions League win over Chelsea. “It’s quite addictive.”
The 22-year-old forward, who joined City in the summer of 2022, has a lot of other passions.
She loves photography. She loves pottery. She would like to have a cafe and perhaps her own clothing brand after she retires from playing.
But these are not mere distractions. They are pursuits which Fowler believes help her as a footballer.
Fowler is an early riser. She tends to go to bed at about 8pm and wake up at 5am or 6am, when she opens her planner and starts ticking off her to-do list. “I purposely wake up early so that I can have some productive hours before training,” she says.
She has time zones to consider too: her boyfriend is Nathan Cleary, who plays rugby league for Australia and the Penrith Panthers and watches most of her matches remotely from Down Under. Afterwards, she will usually call him, but they do not go into detail about performance. “I don’t know rugby and he doesn’t know football well enough,” says Fowler, who is sporting a Penrith Panthers shirt. “We’re not going to give each other advice on that.”
But what is mutually beneficial is mindset. “If I end up saying something that sounds a bit pessimistic, he’s always the first one to chuck in some optimism and try to change the angle of how I’m looking at a situation,” she says. “It’s nice to just speak to someone that gets your experiences but you don’t have to break it down, he just understands. Ninety per cent of the time we don’t even speak about sports.”
Despite City’s impressive first-leg performance in the Champions League last eight, Fowler is very level-headed as they prepare for the second leg on Thursday. “I probably feel the same every time, no matter the result,” she says. “It’s just a new day.”
City have had a turbulent time of late. They sacked head coach Gareth Taylor and put former City and New York City FC manager Nick Cushing in interim charge five days before the League Cup final, which they lost 2-1 against Chelsea, four days before the Champions League first leg.
“It would have been really easy to just give up because we’ve had quite a few setbacks this season with injuries across our squad,” she says. “But I think we turned things around and stepped up our game. The attitude was on point from the girls. We’ve just shown a different side to how we’re playing now.”
Thinking forward has been the message that Cushing has, in Fowler’s words, “hammered” into the team.
“If we win the ball back high, we should just try and go for goal rather than keep possession,” she says. “If we lose it then just try and win the ball back straight away so we can do that again. I don’t think it’s changed how we play necessarily. We’ve just added that new mindset to our game. The girls have really bought into it.”
City have lost two of their four back-to-back meetings with Chelsea across three competitions over 13 days, but they have hurt Chelsea on the counter attack. The problem is that their squad, decimated by injuries, has struggled to sustain the intensity needed — as evidenced by their 2-1 defeat by Chelsea in the Women’s Super League on Sunday.
In the first half of the Champions League first leg last Wednesday, Fowler started in the No 9 position but played more like a false nine.
“I like to be on the ball, connect play,” she says. “I wouldn’t say my strength as a No 9 is getting in the box and on the end of crosses. Bunny (Khadija Shaw) is one of the best at that. When I’m in the nine, it’s more getting on the ball and being an extra player almost in midfield which I enjoy.
“I want to play somewhere where I can get the ball, otherwise I get bored and think: ‘What am I doing?'”
In the second half, Vivianne Miedema and Kerolin Nicoli formed a front two and Fowler moved to her more familiar position on the wing, a role she is “super comfortable” with. City’s opening goal in the Champions League last week came from Laia Aleixandri heading Fowler’s whipped delivery which was tipped onto the crossbar by Hannah Hampton, only for Miedema to react first.
“It feels like quite a creative role in the team where you just get the ball and have to attack,” she says. “That’s your job.”
Therein lies the key word: job.
“It becomes my job. When I’m on the field, I have to be doing these things as a striker and a winger, and if I’m not doing that, I’m not doing the job I’m getting paid to do,” she says. “It sounds really basic to put it that way, but that works better for me. I leave the field and the club and I’m like, ‘OK, job’s done, now I can go do my other work’.”
Viewing football as work has helped Fowler on the few days she does not have “heaps of energy”. The 2023 World Cup semi-finalist approaches those instances with the mentality that, as she puts it, “at the bare minimum I need to tick these boxes of doing my job”.
“My off-field work actually helps me on the field so much because I’m not making football a priority. It sounds really weird to say that but when I’m not caring about football and not thinking about it day to day, I play so much better.”
She feels that investing time in new skills and finding her identity outside of football has been crucial. “It’s made me see a different side to myself where I’m not just football,” she says. “Overall I just feel more whole, I’m putting myself out there in different ways and that’s helped me feel a lot more confident in my football because I have these other things to fall back on which I know I can do as well.”
A sense of play is rooted in everything Fowler does, which is why she tries to surround herself with “lighthearted” and “fun” people, whether coffee with team-mate Kerstin Casparij or hiking with Startup in the Peak District, a national park on the outskirts of Manchester.
“I love having a laugh,” she says. “Sometimes I’m guilty of not taking things seriously enough because if I make a mistake I’m the first one to laugh at myself. Fun is really key in how I live my life.”
However, going into Thursday’s quarter-final second leg 2-0 up, away at Stamford Bridge, she knows City have a job to do.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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