Karen Carney

Karen Carney: ‘I was blown away by so much positivity.’ Photograph: Lee Malone Karen Carney: ‘I was blown away by so much positivity.’ Photograph: Lee Malone She’s the emerging star of this year’s dance show, wowing judges with her pasodoble. The pundit and former footballer talks about gentleness, bullying, her love of the Lionesses and why she’s never been so happy The qualities that made Karen Carney an unstoppable winger on the football pitch – her speed and attack, and the sheer relentlessness of both – are more of a hindrance in the ballroom, for some of the dances at least. As the emerging star of this year’s Strictly Come Dancing , she has had to learn to slow down, stand up straighter, to be softer, and it’s taken a lot of hard work. On week eight, she had just performed the American Smooth, and her pro partner Carlos Gu was tearfully describing Carney’s work ethic. Who could watch her trying to hold back her own tears, chewing on emotion like a particularly tough bit of gristle, and fail to see a woman who was giving it everything? It was Carney’s dream to be on Strictly. The former England footballer, now TV pundit and podcaster, has just made it through week nine, performing an astonishing pasodoble at the all-important Blackpool week, and something will have gone very wrong if she doesn’t reach the final. The show has been struggling this year – a man described as a Strictly “star” was reportedly arrested in October on suspicion of rape last year, and the announcement from its longtime hosts Tess Daly and Claudia Winkleman that this will be their final series has been destabilising. But Carney says that for her, it has been an overwhelmingly positive time. “There’s a team spirit within the cast. Behind [the scenes], the team can’t do enough for you to have the best experience.” Whatever happens, she says the show has already changed her. “I feel like I’m being rewired,” she says. “For 30 years, all I’ve done is football. When you retire, that’s really difficult. I’ve been able to show who I am, and remind myself of who I am as well. I’ve never been so happy. I’ve never smiled so much.” Carney burst on to the show with a leaderboard-topping jive. “It was a lot of kicking – you’d hope I’d be good at kicking,” she says. But the Latin styles and the slower ballroom dances have been difficult. As a child, Carney was diagnosed with Scheuermann’s disease, which causes a curvature of the spine. She has always had to overcompensate for her lack of full mobility, though she didn’t need perfect posture for football. As a child, Carney danced before football took over. She was the youngest of three girls. Their dad was a firefighter, and their mum still works for Sainsbury’s, a job she has had for more than 30 years. She credits her parents for her work ethic: the graft that got her a place on the England squad, a broadcasting career that was initially well out of her comfort zone, a master’s degree and MBA (despite, she says with a laugh, being “not academic at all” and having dyslexia), and several 10s on Strictly. Soon afterwards, she joined Arsenal Ladies, winning the top trophies that season including the Women’s Premier League and the women’s FA and Uefa cups. Around that time, Carney’s mother – now regularly seen cheering in the Strictly audience – was ill. Football was, she says, “a big distraction for me”. It must have been a lot to go through, so young. “I lived away from home, my mum was ill, and football and studying for my A-levels, it was a lot,” she says. “There’s a little fighter in me somewhere.” She would have to draw on her resilience again a few years later when, signing for Chicago Red Stars and playing for the professional league in the US, she had a knee operation that meant she couldn’t play. She sank into depression. Before long, she was self-harming and addicted to sleeping pills. “I was in a pretty bad way. I think that has been the hardest thing I’ve ever had to overcome,” she says. Emma