Rehanne: “We need to stick together”

Unity and togetherness is key for Spurs following Wednesday’s 3-0 defeat at home to Everton in the Women’s Super League.

“We’ve conceded a goal too early in the game again unfortunately,” Head Coach Rehanne Skinner said, reflecting on the game. “That’s made life difficult for us. We made a couple of mistakes and it’s made it really difficult for us to get back into the game. I thought we played really well at times, but we had five chances on target in the first half and just didn’t capitalise on them. 

“We’re just having a little moment at the minute and sometimes that happens in football. We’ve had some positive performances and not got things out of them and we just need to stick together. We’ll keep working on it and obviously looking to improve in the second half of the season in the league.”

In an effort to change things when 2-0 down at half-time, we brought on Angharad James and Jessica Naz in place of So-hyun Cho and Nikola Karczewska at the start of the second half.

“I thought they did have an impact actually and were tidy on the ball. They were changing the dimension of our attack a little bit more and it didn’t work in our favour unfortunately because Jess got injured a little bit after that, which disrupted things again. 

“Celin [Bizet] came on and tried to impact and influence the game as well. I felt like we needed a bit of an adjustment based on the shape and how we were working in that time. We just ended up having to change again fairly quickly so it didn’t really settle in.

“I was more pleased today with our response to mistakes than what I have been in the previous couple of games if I’m honest. We showed a lot of fight and determination. We’re in a position towards the end where we conceded the third and how we’ve ended up with 10 players on the pitch is beyond me to be honest, but that’s something we’ll contest. 

“Ultimately, I think we’ve ended up having a spare player that we’ve not been able to deal with in that moment. Prior to that, we just need to keep fighting, like we did do, and we’ve got to make sure we bring that in every game. I think we’ve not done that at times so far this season and that’s definitely a discussion we had at the end, where I think we’re aware of that and the players want to fix that.

“There’s a lot of voices in the huddle at the end, which is important I think. Collectively we’re in it together. The buck stops with me and we’ve got to get them together as a team and I’ll keep working really hard to do that. It’s football - sometimes it doesn’t go your way for spells and we had this spell in January last year and we got out of it in a positive way and I think that’s where we are. It’s very difficult to have a perfect season and we’ve got to find ways to use our resilience and bring ourselves out the other side in January.”