LFC WomenMatt Beard column: Title pride and a Jürgen Klopp message

It was a fantastic moment for us when we won the title with two games still to play on Sunday and achieved our objective of promotion back to the Women’s Super League. It is well deserved.

I was delighted to get the three points at Bristol City. I felt we dominated the game and I was really pleased – especially with what was at stake and the games that we had over the course of this month have been tough because we played everybody in the top five.

The players deserve the utmost credit for what they have achieved and it was great to celebrate with our fans down there.

We can’t wait to celebrate with everyone when we play Sheffield United at Prenton Park on Sunday April 24 when we get our hands on the trophy. That will be a great day for everyone.

Our staff deserve a massive amount of credit as well because the work every single person has put in this season has been second to none. I’m proud of every single one of them.

We got off to a great start on Sunday when our captain Niamh Fahey got our first goal.

Set-plays have been a big part of our game lately. We scored three of them against Durham, while three out of the four goals at Bristol City also came from set-plays.

We have been working on our corners and, let’s be perfectly honest, Megan Campbell’s throw is undefendable and we are a real threat from it.

It’s something we work on and our analyst Jordan Kevan specifically does a great job with the set-plays.

It was great to see our last goal scored by the Scouser in our team, Missy Bo Kearns.

She has been at this club all her life. We know what this club means to her, she follows the men’s team home and away when she gets the opportunity to. I am delighted for her.

I would also like to give a special mention to our goalkeeper Rachael Laws and Rachel Furness who both played their 50th games for the club down at Bristol.

They are two fantastic players for us and great people as well.

We have now gone 19 games unbeaten in the FA Women’s Championship since we lost 1-0 at home to London City Lionesses on the opening day of the season.

You don’t achieve anything without hard work, and we have worked so hard every single day on the training field and we have got the rewards from it.

After our third game of the season when we were held to a goalless draw at home by Bristol City, I decided to change our formation and go with three at the back.

We’ve got a lot of talented players in this team and some very good centre-backs. I just felt with the way teams set up, we were always playing against a block, so I thought we’d drop an extra defender in there and try to stretch the opposition with the wing-backs.

With the personnel we have, I think the system suits us and it has allowed us to be a little bit tactically flexible. So it has worked well for us with the way teams set up against us.

Someone said to me that’s three times now we have won a title playing against Bristol City. Maybe sometimes things are written in the stars, I don’t know. It’s funny how that stat panned out – crazy, really.

I want to give a lot of credit to Bristol City because they have been on a great run. Lauren Smith has done an unbelievable job there, especially coming into the job late and not having many players. She and the club deserve a lot of credit.

It’s fair to say we had a lively trip back to Merseyside! Everybody was so happy and it was brilliant.

I was singing with the girls. We sang You’ll Never Walk Alone together, which was special, and we were singing the players’ songs that the fans do at games.

It was brilliant to see so many of our supporters down there at Bristol City. They have been different class all season, and our club sponsor Standard Chartered provided free coaches – which was absolutely brilliant.

We worked so hard for that on Sunday and I think there would have been a few sore heads on Monday morning, but they deserved that.

It’s not a relief we’ve got the job done because I think we have deserved to win that division. We’ve finally got it done and it’s a great feeling.

I received some lovely messages, including one from Jürgen Klopp, after the game, which was absolutely fantastic and it meant a lot.

The girls now go away on an international break with smiles on their faces and when we come back we’ve still got six points left to play for.

Our season isn’t over and we have not finished by any stretch of the imagination.

Maybe it might give me an opportunity to give game time to some players who haven’t started as much as they would have liked. But listen, we want to finish the season strongly.

Just because we’ve won the division now doesn’t mean we are going to be taking it easy.

We will be focused, professional and try to get the six points from our remaining two games.

Thanks so much for your support as always.

YNWA,

Matt

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