Some old problems came to play on Saturday when Liverpool visited Manchester United, and they came away with a narrow loss after Julia Zigiotti scored early on. Injuries to critical forwards certainly didn’t help, and the return of Mao Itamura was definitely welcomed, but a loss during a good run of momentum so far this season isn’t an easy blow to take.
“We’re really disappointed. I think we’re disappointed with the performance most of all,” captain Grace Fisk told the club website.
“We’ve played
some really nice football in the first half of the season and we’ve been really dominating games. For whatever reason, we just couldn’t really find our feet today.
“Credit to them, they were really aggressive and direct. We felt like there were phases of the game where we had good momentum and we had chances. They defended around their box really well. But it just wasn’t to be today and we’re really disappointed to leave with nothing.”
The Red Women have shown incredible endurance in this first half of the season to come from behind, and their inability to take control of this game was a big source of all that disappointment, and it not just with the players.
“Gaz [Gareth Taylor] is pretty big on performance and he’s pretty disappointed with the way we played. Just because we’ve played at such a high level and we’ve shown so many times how dominant we can be against some teams,” Fisk explained.
“For whatever reason, we didn’t do that. We kind of played their game more than our game. Like I said, they were very aggressive, very direct.
“We couldn’t really get our foot on the ball. We rushed some decisions and kicked long when really we should try to find solutions. So, it is what it is, it’s one of them. Something to learn from, definitely. But I think going into an international break, we’ve had a pretty good three, four weeks and we just need to learn from this and go forward.”
Even with the loss, it’s clear that this is a different team compared to last season, and that processes are starting to take hold in a team that really lacked any kind of identity or pride in themselves last season. Of course, that is not to dismiss the things they struggled with, but it feels like maybe they have come out of the darkness a little bit.
“I think at the back end of last year, you could definitely see the strides we were taking. But this season we’ve started with some really positive results, a couple of wins and even against Spurs we felt really disappointed we didn’t win that game, we felt like we dominated for the most part,” the captain continued.
“We’re a really confident team, we believe in the coaches and we believe in our playing style. That just makes it more disappointing today that we couldn’t quite execute it. But we’ll definitely work harder to make sure that kind of thing doesn’t happen again.”
The Women go on the road again on October 18th, facing Aston Villa in WSL action.
