LFC WomenMatt Beard column: Man City win, finishing the season strongly and Kiernan return

It was a fantastic day for us on Sunday and I thought it was a good team performance. It was a tough week and a long week heading into the game against City, with a poor start and a great end to it.

Considering we’ve had three games in eight days and didn’t get back from London until 4am on Thursday, I thought we were outstanding, especially that 20, 25-minute period we had at the start of the second half.

There are so many positives that have come out of the back end of this week that we can be really proud of, and both goals on Sunday came from what we had rehearsed in training.

Highlights: Liverpool FC Women 2-1 Man City

We can obviously only pick an XI, plus the substitutes, but everybody played a part this week and had a massive input and impact, so I just want to make sure that they all get the credit that they deserve as well.

Missy Bo Kearns got the winning goal for us and I was delighted for her – that’s now five goals for her this season. Both Bo and Ceri Holland have got forward a lot into some great positions and that has happened since we brought Fuka Nagano into the club.

If you look at that second goal, Ceri received the ball over the other side of the field, a big switch, Bo helps it on to Emma [Koivisto], and then Bo finishes it. If you look at Emma’s starting position, she was level with Razza [Rhiannon Roberts] on the edge of our penalty area, and then within five to six seconds, two or three passes, she is on the attack outside their box. We were really pleased with that goal.

Missy Bo has had a fantastic second half of the season for us. Her and Ceri, as I said, have a lot more freedom now since Fuka has come in and I also think Miri Taylor did a good job in Fuka’s absence at Chelsea. Ceri and Missy Bo have more freedom a bit higher up the pitch – they are both creative players.

Fuka was excellent and put in some great challenges for us, showing another side to her game. If I go back to the Leicester match where we weren’t good enough, Fuka never had the chance to put that right because she missed the Chelsea game due to injury, so I just think maybe that was her way of showing her commitment after what was a bad day.

But she has got that competitiveness and that’s what we liked about her when we watched her and we watched clips of her playing for Japan. She reads the game well, she can step in. We had her in better positions against City but she’s still learning and there’s still a language barrier, so she’s still learning the principles of our defending and what’s expected. So, from that perspective, it’s going to take her time and it’s really going to take her a pre-season. She’s obviously going to miss part of that due to the World Cup, but she’s bright, she’s intelligent and she gets stuck in well.

We learned a lot of lessons in the first half of the season and in the second half of the season we have performed well. We have had a lot of adversity in terms of personnel missing through injury, but we’ve come through that really well and we’ve now got two games to go and we are on 22 points. We can be really pleased and proud with that, and there are still six points up for grabs.

I was absolutely delighted for Natasha Dowie to score and become the first Liverpool player to score 20 goals in the Barclays Women’s Super League. You can’t afford to give Tats opportunities like that.

I’m pleased for her to get the record. She’s had to be patient with the hamstring injury she had after coming back to the club but she’s been a breath of fresh air, to be honest with you. She is great in the dressing room, she is very experienced and she is passing that on to the players, so I was really pleased for her and it’s good for her to get another goal in a Liverpool shirt.

With Reading losing at Aston Villa, it means they can’t catch us now. When we got to 16 points I thought we were safe – history tells us that – but I do feel we could be in a better position. Maybe Manchester City could have had a penalty for the challenge by Faye Kirby but we could have had a penalty against Brighton away and it wasn’t given, we should have had three points at Goodison Park but for the disallowed goal, so it all evens itself out over the course of the season.

We’ve been really pleased with how we’ve done in a very tough league and we’ve learned so much from it. We pushed Chelsea all the way in three games, we’ve beaten Manchester City and even the Arsenal game, their manager Jonas Eidevall said he hates playing us, which is a compliment.

If we keep showing that commitment and desire then we are going to get better, the players are going to get better and they are going to learn from this experience.

We can take a lot of heart from our performance against Manchester City and the way we moved the ball, and hopefully use that experience for our remaining two games because both Aston Villa and Manchester United are flying. But we want to pick up as many points as we can, so we’ve got to play until that last whistle at the end of the season.

We’ve got a blank weekend with no games coming up due to the Vitality Women’s FA Cup final, but I’m quite pleased about that for once. This break has come at the right time for so many different reasons.

I want to wish Melissa Lawley well because she had an operation on her hip last Tuesday. It was quite a complex operation and she will face a lengthy time on the sidelines. Yana Daniels trained on Saturday but then felt something on Sunday, so that’s why she had to drop out of the squad. So, this break gives us an opportunity to get Yana, Leanne Kiernan and Niamh Fahey sharp again.

Leanne and Niamh were on the bench on Sunday. Leanne is doing really well in training and the great thing with her is it doesn’t look like she has been away. Sometimes when you’ve had the type of injury that she has had and the length of time she has been out, you can lose that sharpness – but she was flying in training the other day.

We need to get Niamh back on the pitch for her World Cup selection and also give Leanne that opportunity of making it as well. With us being safe in this division now, we can definitely do that.

As always, thank you for your continued support.

YNWA,

Matt

Matt Beard was speaking to Liverpoolfc.com's Steve Hunter

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