ColumnLFC Women boss Gareth Taylor reviews derby defeat and previews Leicester trip
In his latest column, Liverpool FC Women head coach Gareth Taylor reflects on the Anfield loss to Everton and looks ahead to Sunday’s Barclays Women’s Super League trip to Leicester City at King Power Stadium.
While Sunday turned out to be disappointing for us in the end, I do have mixed feelings about the game.
We wanted to make our supporters happy, the place was rocking when we went 1-0 up, and I felt our first-half performance certainly did that. We scored a fantastic goal but the game, in the end, just went away from us.
There were a lot of positives and I was so proud of the control we had, we really kept Everton on the back foot for the first 40 minutes.
Even conceding that first goal when they went to 1-1, I liked the reaction of the players. We maintained our levels of pressing and we maintained our levels of control in the game.
At 1-0 we should have gone 2-0 or 3-0 up. The stats showed their xG was really low yet they scored four goals. Our xG was OK but that’s football, and you’ve got to make sure you are right in both areas.
But there is something from our first-half performance to hold onto and hopefully our supporters could see the intensity in the team and the way we want to do things and control things.
It was a bit of a freakish day in terms of the scoreline and the chances that we missed, and maybe we just ran out of gas a little bit at those vital moments.
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But we will get better, we will improve on that and get to a point where we are playing like we did in the first half for longer periods of the game.
The second half was a little bit more even, both teams shared the possession and there were probably reasons behind that. Maybe the changes but also I think we need to improve our levels. We have spoken about that and we will do because I know we can dominate games for longer.
Our new striker Beata Olsson made her debut off the bench and she will be stronger for that experience at Anfield.
She gave us energy at the top end of the pitch, particularly in the pressing, but then we had to move her out wide and it was a bit more difficult for her because of tactical reasons.
Fuka [Nagano] got a yellow card and we didn’t want to risk that turning into a red so we had to make some changes when we had to push Beata out wide. But she has been great, she is hungry to do well and she will have a good platform here to be able to do that.
On Sunday we head to King Power Stadium to take on Leicester City and we want to bounce back quickly.
They are a team a bit like us, in transition, and at the moment with no permanent head coach. So, they can always be dangerous, especially playing at home with a bit of freedom and nothing to lose.
We are looking to improve the levels from what we saw in the second half at Anfield. We need to extend that dominance period to at least 55-60 minutes and if we can do that then I think we give ourselves a good chance of being successful in this game.
Thank you for your continued support.
YNWA,
Gareth
Gareth Taylor was speaking to Liverpoolfc.com's Steve Hunter.