The result was the most important thing. That was Renee Slegers’ main takeaway from Sunday’s Adobe Women’s FA Cup fifth round success over London City Lionesses.
We won 2-0 thanks to goals from Laia Codina and Stina Blackstenius to reach the quarter-finals of the competition.
“Clean sheet, I think they only had four shots, one on target,” Renee added in her post-match interview. “And they put a lot of questions on us today. It's a Championship team, they're in the top of the Championship and they've recruited some top players during the summer. So they're a good team.
“The pitch was hard to play on, it was wobbly. So it became a fighting game at times. And I think we'll deal with that today. We wish we could have controlled the game longer with the ball, but we understand where we come from.
“So we understand the big block of games that are behind us with very short turnarounds, two or three days in between games, with high demanding games against Chelsea and Man City. So seeing that and new partnerships on the pitch today again, a clean sheet and two goals and a win, that was most important today.”
Renee handed a debut to Jenna Nighswonger, who got 45 minutes under her belt before being replaced by Lia Walti.
“She's a great person,” Renee said. “I’m happy she joined us. She's taken a lot of initiative to understand what we expect from our players, how we do things in training, what the game model is. She's been great.
“I’ve been talking about it, that we need versatile players in the team. She's a left-back who can also play inside, and that's what she did for us today. We had long conversations about her role, and she picked it up really well. So I'm happy we could give her the debut, and she's going now for us, so that's great.”
Not only did Renee get to see one of our own in Katie Reid at right-back on the afternoon, we also saw our loanee Teyah Goldie in action at centre-back for the opposition.
“Yes, Katie Reid is just developing all the time,” our head coach said. “And seeing there, she's picking up a role that she hasn't been playing before. I'm happy with her development. She's always very critical, so she wants to do better all the time. She has a great mindset.
“It's good to see Teyah. We have so many talents at the club. We have a lot of players on loan now, so it's good to see that they're performing well.”
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