Interview

‘I got the tactics wrong… we were punished’

Joe Montemurro

Joe Montemurro has taken responsibility for our Barclays FA Women’s Super League defeat to Chelsea on Sunday afternoon.

We found ourselves 3-0 down at half-time and fell further behind in the second half, before Beth Mead pulled a goal back with 15 minutes remaining.

We spoke to our head coach at full-time and this is what he said:

on the defeat…

I got it wrong tactically at the start and we got punished for it.

on the tactics before the match…

We hoped to get the overload in the middle of the park, because they don’t play with fullbacks that attack. The problem was we weren’t keeping the ball in the middle of the park with effect for us to be of any threat and we got punished.

on his emotions on the touchline…

I could sense the pattern, I could sense the things that we do as a team normally, passing moving, passing moving were just sloppy and not happening. You could just see with the tactics, they were wrong and just the poor execution of the passes. It just wasn’t working today.

on Chelsea’s threat…

We allowed them to advance in the middle third with ease. Once they did they were able to set themselves up and find that and we weren’t able to match them up centrally. We weren’t able to work out to keep them to an area where we could get the crosses in.

on his message to the players at full-time…

We have to learn. We have to learn from this and we have to learn that sometimes you have to take this as medicine and we have to be better for it. I’ll be disappointed if we don’t learn from it.

on the matches coming up…

We have to take the next steps forward and keep going forward.

on looking forward…

We have to look at it from that perspective too. They’ve dropped four points this year and they needed these points with a game in hand to catch us properly. They needed it and they deserved it. We weren’t good enough today.

By Sam Cox