Rehanne’s reaction to Villa defeat

Rehanne Skinner felt there were positives to take from Saturday, despite our 2-1 defeat against Aston Villa in the Women’s Super League.

“We knew it was going to be a tough test,” she said. “We started the game not how we would want to but probably scored against the run of play really, but it was a really well worked goal in terms of Beth getting her first chance and scoring that. It’s a really positive start for her so we’re delighted for her with that.

“She’s a proven goalscorer, it’s the reason she’s at the Club. She’s historically proven that in the WSL across a number of years so that experience and quality is going to come in really handy for us. We need to keep getting her minutes because she’s not played loads of minutes. This is just the start of things to come really.

“I thought that we started to change the momentum and it was definitely in our favour for a period of time. We didn’t capitalise in that moment to try to get ourselves back into it, but the biggest positive really is that I don’t think that we’ve showed enough of that fight towards the end of a game as what we have done today, so we showed a lot more resilience today and I’m pleased with that and we’ll definitely take that forward into the next game.”

Amy Turner was forced off with an injury during the first half.

“She didn’t feel great at all at the time,” Rehanne explained. “We’re looking into that in more detail but she was okay at half-time when I spoke to her. She felt a little bit better so hopefully it’s nothing to be worrying about.”

Rehanne then brought on Celin Bizet and Eveliina Summanen for Chioma Ubogagu and So-hyun Cho at half-time.

“I just think they’re really good players and we’ve had to manage their minutes a little bit but it was definitely an opportunity to change the way that we controlled the game in terms of possession and both are very good at doing that,” she said. “Immediately, they had an impact in the second half, so it’s really positive in terms of their contributions. We just need to keep getting players back in from injuries that helps us to have more options to keep changing the bench. I thought they did really well when they came on.”