Interview

‘The detail of our play was very impressive’

Montemurro

We returned to the top of our Continental League Cup group with a 7-0 victory over Bristol City on Thursday night, but it was our dominant performance from start to finish that pleased Joe Montemurro most.

With a midfield three of Jill Roord, Kim Little and Jordan Nobbs, we were able to control the tempo in the middle of the park, before quickly switching play out wide to attack space and break behind the Robins’ deep defensive block.

We spoke to our head coach after the final whistle - and this is what he said:

on the overall performance…

It was a very good performance. We’ve built up a lot of confidence and there was a lot of combinations. We’ve worked a lot on the detail of our passing and movement, and I thought we were very, very good in terms of finding the right opportunities to open them up and find space behind them.

on breaking down their deep block…

In terms of the build-up, it’s important to condense the areas as we’re progressing and once we condense the areas, they’ve got to come inside and that allows our full backs, wingers or No 10s to drive into the space in those wide areas. We’ve got the full backs and inverted full backs to do it, and it brought us a lot of joy tonight.

on what he wants to see from his side when they’re leading so comfortably…

I want to see us control the game and tempo. I want to make sure we don’t exert ourselves so that we can find the right opportunities to recover. We’ve got a game against Liverpool in three days, so we’ve got to be ready for that. We’ve had opportunities to rotate our squad and give players rest, and that’s very good for us. We’re in a very good position.

on what pleased him most…

The detail. The detail of our play was really impressive. We spoke a little about the sloppiness in our play against Chelsea in the second half and Tottenham in the first half. The second thing is that these are games that we’re coming into off the back of playing in front of 38,000 and playing at Wembley over the international break. There’s so much euphoria following games like that, and then you’ve got be ready to play a midweek game in the rain. It’s a difficult thing for professional players to maintain. We want to make sure that we keep our standards high and that even in games like this, we’re maintaining the right tempo.

on Mitchell, Veje and Kemme…

We didn’t really need to push them tonight. Mitch probably could have done the job for us tonight, but we just felt that there’s no need to aggravate her injury and increase the possibility of something going wrong. With the other two, we’re in a good position to rest them and they’ve both got niggling issues that could be made worse by playing them. We just didn’t need to risk it because we’ve got a massive second half of the season coming up, and we’re going to need them.