NewsGareth Taylor match reaction: 'We needed to show more quality'
Gareth Taylor felt Liverpool FC Women ‘needed that bit more quality’ as they fell to a 1-0 loss away at Leicester City on Sunday.
The Reds sustained a second successive defeat at the start of the Barclays Women’s Super League season and under their new head coach.
Large periods of dominance of the ball did not produce a goal for the visitors at King Power Stadium and Leicester were able to take all three points.
Just moments after seeing Shannon O’Brien sent off in the second half, the Foxes netted via an Emily van Egmond header and saw out the remainder.
Post-match, Taylor provided his thoughts on the contest to Sky Sports. Read the Q&A below.
On his assessment of the performance…
The performance was OK for large parts of the game, I thought, apart from a 10-minute spell just after half-time when Leicester got a bit of a foothold. We controlled the game, first half we had good situations where we got into their box on a number of occasions. We just needed that bit more quality to find the finish.
By the time the red card comes, it’s where the moments swung in the game. It should swing in our favour and unfortunately it doesn’t. We need to be better at tracking players. [It was] the one moment that they had, it was the one action they had on our goal and scored a goal. Obviously then they make it really difficult. But after that, I felt that we need to be better in the final part, certainly with our use of the ball.
On whether the final part of the play was where it went wrong for Liverpool on the day…
Those games can happen like that, when you are obviously so dominant in everything and one action from the opposition can result in a goal. That’s the importance of tracking runners, making sure we’re staying goal-side. We just need that bit of quality at the top end just to get the final action right.
We obviously bring [Sophie] Roman [Haug] on and we know she’s good in the air, she probably had our best moment with a good save from the ’keeper. But we need to be game-smart with that and know that we can put the ball into the box a little bit more for her. There’s things to work on, for sure.
On Mia Enderby’s condition after suffering a knock in the first half and going off at the interval…
I think she’s OK, just a bit of a knock. I wanted to make a change anyway because I thought Ceri [Holland] might be able to give us a little bit more. We made a few changes and couldn’t really influence the game in the way we wanted to.
On how the team ‘reset’ from here…
We move on. We knew it was going to be tough, in the sense that we’re trying to do things slightly different here and improve things. It takes a little bit of time. But the players are very honest, I’m very honest with them and we’re honest with ourselves in where we can be better. And we need to improve and get better.
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