Neville nets as Spurs Women beat Brighton

Ashleigh Neville’s second-half strike was enough to secure all three points for Spurs Women in Sunday afternoon’s Barclays FA Women’s Super League clash against Brighton & Hove Albion at the Hive.

It was a scrappy and cagey affair that, rather fittingly, was decided by the scrappiest of goals. Rachel Furness sent a ball in from the left to the incoming Neville who, despite having her first attempt blocked, made no mistake on the second by bundling the ball into the net to seal a 1-0 win.

Karen Hills and Juan Amoros made four changes to the side that played out a 1-1 draw at Birmingham City in midweek with Josie Green, Anna Filbey and Chloe Peplow coming back into the side and Gemma Davison making her first start since returning from an ankle injury.

Furness carved open the first clear-cut opportunity of the match when she was played in down the right by Neville in 25th minute, but the midfielder’s effort was comfortably saved by Megan Walsh in the Brighton goal. Just a few moments later, Davison tried her luck from distance after cutting in from the left-hand side, but Walsh was again in the way of her looping shot.

Brighton went close just before the break as Lea Le Garrec fizzed in a low shot from range. Thankfully, goalkeeper Becky Spencer was able to smother the shot and prevent the hosts from taking the lead.

We found the breakthrough that we’d been looking for two minutes before the hour mark when Neville bundled home a Furness cross after her first shot was blocked. We then had a golden opportunity to double our advantage 10 minutes later when Furness curled a shot from distance that was parried away by Walsh. It looked as if Rianna Dean was going to follow up, but the Brighton keeper did well to save her effort from close range.

Brighton piled the pressure on towards the end of the match, but we held firm and defended heroically amid the onslaught to make sure of our first three points in the WSL since our 2-1 triumph over Bristol City at the end of October.

Coach’s view

Head Coach Karen Hills told us afterwards: “It’s a massive result for us. We always want to get more points on the board and I thought today was a very tough and challenging game but thankfully we’ve managed to get the three points, which is great off the back of what’s been quite a tough period. It was a really end-to-end, very physical game. Both teams were quite close together in terms of the physical element of the game. I thought the conditions played a bit of a part but we deserved the win at the end, in the last five minutes they were piling a lot of pressure on but I thought we absorbed it really, really well, we stood really strong, we were resilient in those last five minutes and we showed we’ve got that quality and that character to really try and dig out games. We also talk about game management – we’ve got to try to actually manage games and make sure that we can hold a lead as well and I was really pleased with how we did that today.”

Match data

Goal: Spurs - Neville 58.

Yellow cards: Spurs - Leon 76, Peplow 82.

Referee: Emily Heaslip.

Venue: The Hive, London.

Weather: Partly cloudy, nine degrees.

Attendance: 571.