Martin Ho praised the mentality of his squad to fight back to secure a 2-1 win over Liverpool and return to winning ways in the Barclays Women’s Super League on Sunday.
Beata Olsson fired the away side into a lead on 11 minutes at Brisbane Road but we responded well to the early deficit and, eight minutes later, Toko Koga was in the right place at the right time to convert her first goal for the Club.
We completed the comeback eight minutes into the second period after a clinical finish from Bethany England gave us the advantage and following a professional display from that point onwards to hold on to the lead, we claimed our fifth win of the campaign – already matching our tally from entirety of last season - and climbed back to fourth in the table.
Speaking to us after the game, Martin said: “After the international break, the players came back and we maybe had one or two days together to really prepare for the game, so I thought they did well.
“It’s probably going to be a little bit disconnected at first and there’s a little bit of apprehension in certain moments, but I think Liverpool’s first goal woke us up - even though it came in a way we didn’t want to happen. It livened us up and from that moment, we were very dominant.
“They had some moments, which we’ll need to look at, but for large spells of the game we were the dominant team.
“It’s important,” when asked about the response from going behind. “When you get a response like that, it’s a sign that the team’s mentality is changing - that they don’t want to be behind.
“It wakes them up, and you see a different energy and intensity. It came from a set play and Chris [Williams] works really hard on those, it’s important that we can score from those areas too. The build-up to Toko’s goal was brilliant.
“When we got the second goal, it was good play - a good ball from Olivia [Holdt] into Amanda [Nilden], who puts it across and it’s a great finish from Bethany. These are the moments we need more of. We need to put ourselves in positions where we can win games and we need to be ruthless with the chances we get. I think we did that today.”