Despite Sunday’s narrow defeat against Celtic in the Sky Sports Cup, Head Coach Jack Beesley was full of praise for this side who went toe-to-toe against their full-time opponents from the opening whistle and put in a gargantuan effort throughout.
“I’m absolutely delighted with the performance on Sunday, probably the most complete performance I’ve seen us deliver against a full-time team in the past 3 seasons.
“In terms of sticking to their jobs, the players carried out everything to a tee: sacrificing the ball in certain areas, defending the box and looking to counter quickly. Although Celtic had a lot of efforts on goal, most were from controllable areas and from distance.
“You always need a bit of luck in these games – we hit inside of the post and it stays out at 0-0, they hit the inside of the post a few minutes later and it goes in. Some consolation for us though is it was a goal that came from a piece of quality, as opposed to us gifting goals which has been the issue against the full-time teams in the previous two games.
“And then Freya Brien is unlucky not to score to make it 1-1, at a stage of the game where we were playing 4-2-4 and in my eyes. looked the more threatening out of the 2 teams. So, from our perspective, as close to the perfect game as we could have hoped for, but you still come away with nothing, which just shows the gulf between teams like Celtic and ourselves.
“But the players who played yesterday showed a togetherness, fight and ability to execute a game plan, which should give them confidence and belief that we compete for long periods against Hearts next week.
“We were well beaten by them in pre-season, so the objective for us is to try and be more competitive than we were last time, continue to show a trend of improvement from the Rangers game, and control what we can control, which is how much we we’re willing to sacrifice to compete in these types of games.
“If we can show again that we’re continuing to acclimatise to the hump jump in challenge from SWPL2, that we’re improving and fighting for each other, then that will be the measure of success for us.”
