Their mother still cooks Sunday lunch for both of them, on the rare weekends the fixture list allows it. Getting them to sit at the same table, though, has taken some diplomacy this season — the two brothers, born fifteen months apart, are both first-team regulars for clubs that have developed a fierce, needling rivalry over the past three seasons.
The older brother, a centre-back, has been at Sheffield Blades since he was sixteen. The younger, a forward, left the same academy at nineteen after being told he wasn't going to get a pathway to the first team, and signed for Bradford Spinners instead — a decision their family says caused "about a month of frost" before everyone made their peace with it.
This season's meeting between the two clubs produced a moment that's already local legend: the younger brother scoring past the older, then immediately being wrapped in a bear hug by the very man he'd just beaten, to the visible confusion of teammates on both sides who'd never seen the full story.
"People think it's easy because we're brothers," the older one said afterwards. "It's not. For ninety minutes he's not my brother, he's a striker trying to get past me. Then the whistle goes and he's my brother again. We've had to learn how to switch that off and on."