Ash: “I’m hoping for another 50”

Ashleigh Neville made her 50th Women’s Super League appearance during our 3-0 defeat to Manchester City on Saturday.

“You want to win a game when you’re making your 50th appearance,” she said. “Unfortunately we didn’t get the win, but it’s nice to have all the fans here cheering me on and I’m hoping for another 50!

“We competed well all over the park. We won the ball higher up the pitch compared to last week, where I feel like we had a great first half and weren’t so good in the second half. In the whole 90 minutes for this game, we competed but it’s unfortunate that they could capitalise on our few mistakes in the middle and score three goals from it.

“3-0 is a little bit flattering for them. Don’t get me wrong, they have capitalised on the chances they’ve been presented with, but that’s our mistakes that have given them two goals and then we’ve conceded off a set-piece, so I don’t really feel like they’ve opened us up, which is a credit to the girls, not letting them come in and dealing with crosses, but they’re very clinical and if we can take something from that and do that on our end then we’ve got chances of scoring goals.”

When getting into dangerous areas, Neville feels that we need to be more willing to get a shot away and ask questions of the defence we’re coming up against.

“It’s about not being scared to shift your feet and get a shot off,” she said. “We always talk in training that we need to get more shots off and I feel like we had quite a few chances today where we could have and we turned them down. We need to be more positive and believe in ourselves that we can and maybe the goals will come.

“It’s just minor things. We’ll go back and look into what went wrong and what went well. There are some positives to take away from today even though, losing 3-0, you’d think ‘what positives are there?’ We’ve spoken about them already, but we’ve got to go away and look at it and then prepare for Brighton away next week.”