Despite a late scare, Joe Montemurro was delighted with our performance in our 2-1 victory over West Ham on the opening day of the season.
We found ourselves two goals to the good at the break thanks to a stunner from Beth Mead and a debut strike from Jill Roord - but we were almost left to rue our missed chances, as Martha Thomas pulled one back, before Kenza Dali rattled the woodwork in the 90th minute.
We spoke to Montemurro after the game and this is what he said:
on the overall performance…
I thought we were very good in the first half, I really did. I thought it was one of our best performances because we completely controlled the tempo and they only had one opportunity - and that was a long ball, second-ball scenario. That was all they had. Even in the second half they really didn’t create much apart from the goal. The movement was good and we were very good at times, so we’ve just to find that continuity and you expect that on day one. But the reality is that opposition goals change games. That goal came against the run of play after DvD missed a chance, Kim missed a chance and Beth missed another. It could have been three or four before they’d even scored, but could’ve, would’ve, should’ve. We made it difficult for ourselves at the end but we’ve got to learn to grind games out too. We’ve got to learn to defend and be smart when teams play this transition style football.
on our midfield movement - and Jill Roord playing in a deeper role…
We put Jill a little deeper in the second half and that was to give her a little bit of rest and a recovery because the game was being played at a high tempo and we need to make sure that they got through, and obviously we’ve got a game on Thursday too. Tactically we made a few changes today to save a few players and freshen up players. We were trying to get them in areas where we thought they didn’t need to work quite as hard.
on our focus switching to Fiorentina…
Yes, the Champions League will be big for us and then we’ve got Manchester United, which is going to be really, really tricky on Monday night. We’ve just got to freshen everyone up, get them on a flight to Florence, get some goals there and then we can come home with hopefully the tie in place.
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