Natasha Flint Joins Scottish Women’s Premier League Celtic On Loan
Leicester City Women have confirmed that striker Natasha Flint has joined Women’s Scottish Premier League outfit Celtic. The forward makes the move north of the border until the end of the 2022/23 Scottish Women’s Premier League season and will link up with a Celtic side currently battling at the top end of the table.
Flint, who joined the club in June 2020 from Blackburn Rovers and temporarily leaves Belvoir Drive having scored twenty-five goals in sixty-three appearances for the Foxes. The former England youth international will now link up with her new team-mates in Glasgow as they prepare to host Aberdeen Women on Sunday.
Having started her career at the age of seventeen, Flint signed her first senior contract with Manchester City ahead of the club’s first season in the Women’s Super League. Flint scored her first senior goal against Chelsea which was named a finalist for the 2014 FA WSL Goal of the Season. She was named in the starting lineup when Manchester City won the 2014 Continental Cup (WSL Cup). The following season she struggled to get into the team, making just one start and five substitute appearances before being released.
Flint, then had a couple of years moving around a number of clubs which started at Preston North End (later renamed Fylde Ladies) in the FA Women’s National League North, before moving to Notts County in the Super League. However, she left Notts County in March 2016 just four days before the start of the 2016 FA Women’s Super League for “personal reasons”. She then signed with Fylde Ladies in June 2016, before joining Sheffield FC just six months later in the WSL2 (now FA Women’s Championship) before going back to Fylde Ladies in the July of the same year.
Flint signed for Blackburn Rovers in the FA Women’s National League in December 2017 and it looked like the right club. Having helped Blackburn Rovers achieve their first-ever promotion to the FA Women’s Championship and scoring in the Play-Off Final against Coventry United. Although she was limited to six games and nine goals in the 2019-20 season which curtailed by the Covid-19 pandemic she amassed an outstanding goalscoring record for the Lancashire club scoring seventy goals in just sixty-six appearances over three seasons.
In June 2020, she left Blackburn Rovers at the conclusion of her contract and joined Leicester City Women along with eleven other new players who were brought in as part of the club’s conversion to a fully professional structure. She won the Women’s Championship Player of the Month honours for December 2020 with four league goals during the month. On 4th April 2021, Flint scored the second Leicester City goal in a 2–0 win over London City Lionesses to secure the title and promotion to the FA Women’s Super League.
Flint had previously worked part-time as a lab technician, but after losing the job to a Covid-19 pandemic forced furlough, she moved to training full-time, a change that she has credited for her scoring form with Leicester City. She ended the 2020–21 Championship season as the club’s top scorer with seventeen goals in the competition. On 16th May 2021, Flint scored the winning goal in a 2–3 upset of Manchester United in the fifth round of the 2020-21 Women’s FA Cup.
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