After the final pre-season match against Darlington FC Women, we sat down and spoke to Gateshead Ladies manager Carl Morrison to find out about his team before the start of the season.
“I’m feeling optimistic about the upcoming season. We’ve had a bit of a mixed bag in pre-season. Availability in the summer can sometimes be a bit all over the shop so we’ve had different lineups played out, people playing in different positions, playing opposition from higher leagues and lower leagues, but I think on the whole it’s been really promising.”
“I feel like we had the better eleven today, we had one girl who’s been out for a while, another girl played with a knock, another girl made a full debut for us. So to see the way we played, and taking into consideration all the circumstances we was amazing. I think the girls grafted from start to finish, worked hard, fought together for each other and in the units, it was a really, really pleasing performance.” said Carl.
“So we’ve assessed all of our players through pre-season now, including our new players and we’ve seen where we want to play them such as their first position and second position. Now it’s kind of looking to nail down what the starting line-up is going to look like for the first game and then working towards a system on how we’ll play and who’s going to excel in their given positions.”
“I think after today everybody has went away buzzing due to the various circumstances of holidays and illnesses, there was a thought that we might not be able to commit to today’s fixture because we’ve got that many people away and we’ve had a few people pull out but we said look we’ll come here with just eleven players. Darlington were a very good team and how we dug in and battled it looks very promising for what it’ll be like when it comes to the competitive fixtures.
“We haven’t chosen anyone to be captain yet and we’ll be announcing the captain situation next week. The players we’ve observed in pre-season, the ones who have stepped up as a leader will help us come to a decision on who should be captain and vice captain. There’s a lot of really good girls in the group who’ve all got really good leadership qualities, so we need to make the most of that.”
