Tottenham Hotspur Women crashed out of the Conti Cup on Wednesday night to two-time competition winners Chelsea. However, the performance was a much-improved one compared to recent displays, and head coach Rehanne Skinner gave her views on the match to SPURSPLAY via the club’s official website.
When asked if there were positives from Wednesday night’s defeat, Skinner highlighted her satisfaction with her side’s capacity to stick to her prescribed game plan and stifle Chelsea for much of the first half before going 1-0 down:
“I was really pleased with the performance. I thought overall worked really hard on the game plan, tactically, and we stuck to jobs and made it really difficult for and frustrated Chelsea, which was obviously our intent.
“[We went] in 1-0 [down] at half-time and we’d had a good chance as well, so we were in a really positive space in the game.”
Nevertheless, Spurs’ tendency to commit fatal errors at the back reared its ugly head again, and in the end proved to be Spurs’ undoing, something that Skinner lamented, although it did not take away from the positives of the overall display:
“Ultimately, I think we’ve made three mistakes, and that’s cost us a goal situation, and they were three things we could cut out, but I think the biggest thing is the positives from the performance.
“Fighting until the end, getting a goal back, being resolute until the end, more determined in everything we were doing, so that’s something we’ve not had in every game, and that is something we need in every game moving forward.”
Skinner then returned to the foundations of Spurs’ successful spells of the match, most notably in the first 20 minutes, in which play was primarily occurring in Chelsea’s half as the visitors were pinned back due to the hosts’ hard work, something that the head coach praised:
“We’re building a team with talent as well as hard work. We’ve had the talent, and we’ve needed to add the hard work. We’re [now] grinding things out a bit more, which I didn’t think we did in the first half of the season, but today, I thought we worked really hard to make life difficult for Chelsea.
“When we had the ball, I thought we were really effective with it at times, exploited gaps in front of their back four in particular really, really well. It gave us a lot of time on the ball and opportunities to make good attacking situations, so really pleased with that side of the game.”
In a busy week for the women’s team, Rehanne Skinner’s side crashed out of the Conti Cup quarter-finals last night at home to Chelsea. You can read the match report with my takeaways from the game here, or have your say on the match, defender Esther Morgan’s move away or any other Spurs-related matters on the Vital Spurs fan forum here.