We hit eight goals past Slavia Prague on Thursday night but for Joe Montemurro, the defensive work-rate was the most impressive part of our game.
It was our third consecutive clean sheet in all competitions, as we swept past the Czech side to book our place in the Women’s Champions League quarter-finals.
We spoke to our head coach after the game and this is what he said:
on the defensive strength in the squad…
It’s quite evident that we’ve worked on pressing from the front, we’ve worked a lot with the front four so they understand their role but if it does get beaten then we have a second set-up within the third phase so I think that has helped the back four. Even the goals that we’ve conceded, they have been down to individual errors, especially at Chelsea where there were errors in the build-up and similarly against Prague in the first-leg.
on our midfielders’ work-rate…
It’s very good to build up in play but if you don’t have players that are being involved in the forward action then you can’t finalise the action. We knew that their fullbacks were quite narrow and quite aggressive so we would expose their two centre-backs so we just made sure in build up we had players in the right areas to receive the ball.
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