Heading home with three points following a convincing 2-0 victory against Durham, Damon Lathrope was delighted with Watford FC Women’s display on his 50th game in charge of the Golden Girls.
Covering topics including the quick start, clean sheet, Carly Johns’ return and the physicality of the game, find out what the Head Coach had to say below:
On ideas coming to fruition
It was like a mindset shift. We spoke about that this week and did a little exercise on it, just to provoke some thought and I think we saw how together the team are and how you get your rewards when you stick together and fight really hard for each other, so we’re really pleased.
The quick start and clean sheet
I wouldn’t say we had to hold on, I think we looked the most likely to score again. I think Safia (Middleton-Patel) has made one unreal save at a brilliant time for us, but other than that, I don’t think they had another shot on target.
I felt we could have made the margin slightly bigger at times, so I think in a moment in the game where we could have gone onto the back foot and tried to protect, we stuck to our guns and it made it a bit more of a comfortable last 30 minutes than maybe in the past.
Carly Johns’ performance
It's massive, I can’t believe how much ground she covered today, there was a real bit of fire in her belly and maybe that’s because she’s coming back into the team; she’s got a point to prove and that is absolutely everything we ask of her.
We know she’s a really intelligent footballer, and she showed today that she has more than that to her game, and even though she’s not the biggest physically, she can compete and she’ll fight and run.
The goal will do her the world of good and I wouldn’t be surprised to see that turn into more going forward.
The physicality of the game
We do have that tag as the only part-time team in the league, and we know physically that’s something we have to overcome, and today proves that we can compete physically with those teams that are full-time and would think they have that edge on us.
Again, we spoke about the mentality of it this week, today just proves massively that if we approach it with the right mindset, it doesn’t matter that we’re the only part-time side or not. We can compete, we can run just as far and fight just as much as these more physical teams. We’re really pleased, but we need to back it up now.
That's the key for me, we haven’t cracked it, we’ve still got loads of work to do but it’s a big shift in momentum that we need to make the most of.
Building on the result
I actually think about the last four or five games and they’ve been good. Against London City we were excellent, we were really dominant for large spells of that game but two mistakes led to two goals and all of a sudden it taints the performance. Southampton in my opinion, we were better for a half. We created better opportunities and then a mistake, it taints it. So I feel like we’re in a good place and it was just the result that we needed to justify that, and now we’ve got that we need to take all the positives and all the momentum from it, and make sure we back it up with some more performances and more results.
