Meet Jess Park, the teenager hoping to propel Manchester City to FA Cup glory

[ASFN Admin]

Jess Park is not one to hype herself up. When she started for Manchester City against Ipswich Town in the FA Cup in February, aged just 18, Park certainly made her mark - scoring a hat-trick in the 10-0 drubbing. But she played it down. “I did all right," she said after the game, "three goals and a few assists is decent.” It is a cool approach she has fostered since joining City, starting in their talent pathway in 2017, before moving up to the first team less than a year later. She admits she is not fazed by much, not playing with nearly a dozen Lionesses, or meeting childhood hero Sergio Aguero or even moving to a new city away from her family home in Brough, near Hull. That is not to say she is aloof or unaffected by her early success, but she is just keeping her head down and working hard. Beneath her relaxed exterior though, she admits she knew that hat-trick was something like a breakthrough. "It was kind of unbelievable," she says, reflecting on the game. "It was really surreal. I’d had a few games before that, where it felt like there were goals coming but they weren’t quite there. In the Ipswich game I got the opportunity to start and I kind of switched on to just enjoying it - and obviously people on the pitch supported me too. I was really over the moon with myself afterwards." It was a performance against fourth-tier opposition, sure, but one that helped her team to the delayed FA Cup final on Sunday. And it saw Park come good on the promise she has shown since she was a child. She first caught scouts' attention with her acceleration and finishing ability while at York City's girls' talent pathway. Coaches there called her a "once in a generation talent" - a compliment Park cringes at shyly when reminded: "I said thank you, but I didn't believe what they were saying, I just cracked on really." In 2018, she was named in Uefa's Team of the Tournament at the Under-17 Euros - the only England player to earn the accolade. Learning from a group of England stalwarts like Jill Scott, Lucy Bronze and Steph Houghton at City is the perfect training ground for the ambitions she harbours of one day breaking into the senior squad, she says.

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