Carla Ward spoke to media at Bodymoor Heath on Friday morning as she looked ahead to Sunday’s Barclays WSL encounter against West Ham United.
Aston Villa’s manager discussed last weekend's victory over Bristol City and the performance that achieved the result, what went wrong during our difficult spell earlier on in the campaign and league positioning.
Here’s what she had to say…
On last weekend's result...
“It breeds confidence, of course. But the reality is that it doesn’t change anything in the building because the players have been training well and have been looking after each other. It certainly puts us in a good position to finish November how we want to.”
On the performance...
“We played against a team that played a very low block, a team that wanted to put everybody behind the ball. We knew that going into the game. In the past we may have forced it and maybe gone away from what we wanted to try and do but I think we executed the gameplan brilliantly. It did take a while but we kept plugging away. The patience and the mindset from the group was excellent and to get the first and second [goals] was exactly what we needed.”
On what went wrong during the difficult spell...
“Confidence. People talk about tactics, technical aspects and the rest of it… confidence and momentum in football is huge. It’s massive. You can be training well and against Manchester United and Arsenal we were excellent. We were dominant on the ball against Liverpool and we were dominant on the ball against Tottenham. Last season there was a confidence about us to turn games around and we got a lot of points from losing positions. This season, we go a goal behind and the lack of confidence plays a massive part. The mental side of the game is huge.”
On league positioning...
“Three points at the weekend could see us jump three places and, all of a sudden, the conversation changes. You win the next two games and you could be inside the top six/seven by the end of the month. The reality in the WSL is everybody can beat everybody. You’re going to go on runs when you win games and you’re going to go on runs when you lose games. It’s making sure you don’t lose too many because then you can fall behind.
