By Ian Herbert For The Daily Mail
Published: 22:30 BST, 28 June 2019 | Updated: 22:50 BST, 28 June 2019
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It didn't just seem like the emotion talking when Phil Neville said after his team's World Cup quarter-final win that 'we're getting to that legacy moment'.
There was something deeply emblematic about Thursday night: David Beckham high-fiving Baroness Sue Campbell, the FA's director of women's football, and the record 7.6 million viewing figures, ahead of the real sense across Britain on Friday that women's football was being discussed on pure technical merit like never before.
'We're not getting carried away but we are inspiring and it feels really good,' Neville said.
Lucy Bronze celebrates her goal as England beat Norway at Women's World Cup on Thursday
We have been here before with the England women's team, though this seems different. For the first time, there is a side with the technical faculty to challenge the world's best, a fully professional top-flight domestic division and players to expose the fallacy that the game lacks quality and entertainment value.
Neville's part in lifting things to the next level extends beyond him drafting in his old friend Beckham — whose appearance in the stands with his daughter, Harper, was deft, making it more than an emblem of the men's game granting approval.
The England manager speaks with a wide-eyed enthusiasm which makes you see that he is on the same journey of discovery as the audience the women's game is trying to attract. It is a difficult path he treads — speaking up for women's sport from a perspective steeped in men's football without sounding patronising. But it works.
He has been a strong salesman for a game which, just one year into fully professional
