
“After the game I had lots of different emotions really, but it also shows the levels we need to be at to compete because we just didn’t reach any of those levels in the first half. Then when we did reach the levels in the second half, we did show we could compete and make a game of it.”
“I thought we started the game pretty well, although they nicked an early goal. After about 15 minutes or so I thought we were okay, we were doing well. I didn’t see a big loss or anything coming. I thought, we can cope, we can compete. When the second goal goes in, I think, you know, heads dropped, or we waited too long in between actions, we weren’t quick enough on any transitions. So if you give somebody two or three seconds before you’ve made a decision of what you’re going to do, we’ll end up getting punished. And that’s what they did. There was just a lot of goals in that first half that didn’t need to happen.”
“At half time I said, you know, we act like it is a new game now, it’s 0-0 effectively, we’ve got to do better, let’s not make it get any worse. Obviously they got a couple of goals late in the second half, but I think we did keep it at 0-0 in that second half for quite a while, and we did compete and people were fighting even with the kind of a squad we had and not many numbers to come off the bench. We worked hard and fought hard for each other and then we haven’t embarrassed ourselves in that second half and we’ve competed. So I think there’s a lot to take out of that. And then we’ve trained last night, worked on stuff that went wrong on Sunday. And the training, to be honest, was absolutely fantastic last night. Really promising. So you hope in the short term, it was one of those days like, you know, you’re having a bad day that nobody wants and it’ll take you a little bit to get over but longer term sometimes bigger things come from from days like these and I believe that’ll be the case with this.”
“This cup game was quite short notice and it changed pre-season plans and you’ve got girls on holiday and stuff so it wasn’t really ideal. So we’re out of that cup now which allows us to focus on the actual league starting but also the other competitions. So yeah, it’s just, you know, one less thing to focus on now. And we know we’ve got our aims and priorities this season. We’ll be sticking to that.”
“We knew we were going to play a very good team, we knew we had a threadbare squad, so we did know going into the game that we were up against it. It just was not acceptable as a first-half performance on any level. All we can do is learn from it and work on making sure it doesn’t happen again. As a group of coaches and players, that’s what we worked on and then we looked at the aspects that went wrong in the game and what we could do as a session last night that would help us to deal with that going ahead and it was productive, the girls were good with it, they weren’t too disheartened, they realised things like this happen and that we’ll move on from it.”