We are just shy of 10 months on from when the Swiss forward Alisha Lehmann joined West Ham. With no English, and at the age of 19, it was a step into the unknown for her. Now, though, the winger has a PFA young player of the year nomination under her belt and is preparing for West Ham’s first FA Cup final, against Manchester City on Saturday.
“It really is a culture shock because Switzerland is so small and it’s huge here,” says Lehmann, sitting in the sun outside the clubhouse at West Ham’s Rush Green training ground, where the women’s team play their home games. “It’s different, but in a good way different.”
The change was initially hard but the decision to move was not. “At first when I got to the first team, with the national team, it was an easy decision because all the players play in other countries because the Swiss league isn’t that good,” she says. “In Switzerland you can’t take the steps you want to.”
She was prepared for the difficulties her lack of English would pose but not for east London. “First when I came I couldn’t speak, you know? It was so hard because the dialogue here is … oh my God, I couldn’t understand anything.”
Now her English is way beyond what you would expect after 10 months. “When you speak English all day you can’t really not [learn it],” she says modestly.
Lehmann was plucked from the relative unknown by the then new West Ham manager, Matt Beard, who has a knack for that. She was playing for Swiss team Young Boys and had shone for the national team at the European Women’s Under‑19 Championship and featured for Switzerland’s senior side since 2016.
After a brief settling-in period – “I needed a few games to get used to this intensity; it’s more physical” – she got her first goal in West Ham’s ninth game of the season, scoring the winner as they came from behind to beat Everton 2-1.
But what was her image of West Ham as a club before she arrived? “I only knew the men’s. Because the women [had] played in the third tier, I didn’t know them.”
Of the men’s she “only knew they play in the Premier League and then a few players. Chicharito [Javier Hernández] I knew, because he played in Germany. [Marko] Arnautovic because of Austria. A few but not much.”
She has nine goals in her maiden season, mainly playing on the wing, and was nominated for the PFA young player of the year alongside the winner, Georgia Stanway, and the main award winner, Vivianne Miedema.
The English league was not completely alien to Lehmann, whose partner is the Chelsea striker Ramona Bachmann, a fellow Switzerland international. In the BBC fly-on-the-wall documentary Britain’s Youngest Football Boss we get an insight into the competitiveness between the two as West Ham prepare to face Chelsea for the first time. Bachmann went on to score the only two goals of the game. In the return the former Chelsea player Gilly Flaherty earned West Ham a draw at Kingsmeadow which confirmed that Chelsea would miss out on Champions League qualification via a top-two finish.
The pair could have met at Wembley, too, only for an injury-time Magdalena Eriksson own goal in the semi-finals to put City through at the expense of Chelsea, who arguably had the better chances. Lehmann scored the equaliser in West Ham’s semi-final at Reading, which ended 1-1 before they won 4-3 on penalties. Was Lehmann happy to avoid another on-pitch battle with her other half? “If they had won I would have been happy for her. But I don’t mind; in the end we need to win, we don’t mind who we play against.”
Now, she can get advice about the Wembley final: “We spoke about them playing there last year. She scored two goals, she told me a little bit about how it will be and I think that’s good for me because I can take the positive things.”
Should West Ham beat the odds and come away with a trophy, it would be a testament to Beard’s experience, the support from the club and a remarkable knitting together of 18 players, plus the two added in January, in less than a year.
“We came from all over the place and I think that’s why we are so close,” Lehmann says. “We are a little bit like a little family. When I go home and come back I feel really good here. We have really good people and personalities here and it works.”
