The Golden Girls marked their return to Grosvenor Vale with three huge points in the race for Barclays Women’s Championship safety, securing a 2-0 win over Birmingham City. Michelle Agyemang joined the action with 20 minutes left to play and had broken the deadlock within four minutes, before firing home a second shortly after.
After the game Damon Lathrope spoke to the media and was full of praise for his defensive unit, who secured a second clean sheet in as many games.
Read what the Head Coach had to say below…
His feelings at full-time:
I’m over the moon for the group, and I say the group because it is genuinely every single one of them. I’ve been banging on for a long time about the importance of the squad and this last couple of weeks has emphasised how much we need every single player in there and they got what they deserved today.
The defensive performance:
It’s the foundation to everything and in the last couple of weeks we’ve worked a hell of a lot on out-of-possession. I’m not saying that we’re taking the credit for that as it’s the players that go out and do it, but we’d identified that it’s an area we needed to get better.
We’ve been conceding a lot of goals in the first half of the season and if we could stem that flow, we back ourselves to go the other way and create opportunities, so they’ve been absolutely brilliant. Sophie McLean, falling into that bottom line has looked like she always played there to be honest, she’s been absolutely brilliant as have the other players that have had the opportunity to play in there.
It’s always the foundation, the out-of-possession, keeping clean sheets and to get two on the bounce against two really tough opponents gives us huge confidence.
The recent performances:
I think anyone that’s watched us over the first half of the season, and we speak to the other clubs when we come up against them, we haven’t been far away at all. In my biased opinion maybe, it was a false representation of the league table, it probably didn’t represent how close we’ve run teams, so we’ve always believed.
We genuinely always believed that we would turn a corner and that things would take a positive turn. Talk is cheap though, we had to back it up and that’s what we talked about as well, we need to back it up, so like I say, it’s not really a surprise to us if I am being honest, we knew where we needed to work, we knew where we needed a little bit of help in the team and now we need to continue this.
The pressing:
We were really front foot, and again we’ve proved that we can match the full-time teams. I think training in the evening, really late at night, as tiring as it is and as hard as it is on your recovery, it creates a certain mentality and a mindset. When you’ve got to dig deep in games, and you’ve really got to find something within you training until 11 o’clock at night sometimes creates something in you that you can’t replicate. That’s what we need to fall back on, the group’s really honest so it doesn’t surprise us, but the pressing, the hard work is a given for this group.
The break in fixtures:
In an ideal world we’d have fixtures coming thick and fast at the moment because they’re really feeling good and they’re producing good performances but also on the flip side, if you haven’t got a game for three weeks, it’s quite nice to have a group that are feeling good about themselves and you can continue to work. You’re not trying to pick the group as much as maybe we have in the past, so pros and cons to both. It is what it is, we can’t affect it so we’ll try and make the best we can out of the next three weeks so we’re ready to go for the next one.
