WNL: Shelbourne vs City Preview

The Cork City fans watching last weekend’s Sligo Rovers Women FC game, be that at Turner’s Cross or live on LOITV.ie will all have struggled to explain how Cork City FC Women failed to come away with three points, but within ten second half minutes, a game City had dominated slipped away. Paul Farrell is the first to admit that while the performance was good, his side should really have come away with the win.

“Look, the reality is that we dominated the game, and the result was massively disappointing. We had 22 shots on goal, which I can’t remember us doing before. The performance was great. We should have been well ahead at half time, and we had a good chat at half time; we all said that if we didn’t take our chances we could get caught and that’s exactly what happened.”

While City continued to dominate at the start of the second half, a goal against the run of play which struck the post and then rebounded off keeper Abby McCarthy into the net, gave Sligo the lead.

“The first goal has a touch of luck about it, Abby has no chance and I think we were still trying to react to that when the second goes in. When you’re dominating as we were it can be difficult to react when you’re caught, and we just hadn’t set ourselves when the second was scored.”

“Then we finished strongly, we pulled the goal back through Nadine but just couldn’t get the result we deserved. We did everything in the first half except score, but we just have to be ruthless. “

“We have young players up front who did great for us. While Sligo are a new team, they have some very experienced players, which we spoke about before the game. Kirsten Semple in the Sligo goal, who we know well, had a fantastic game and Sligo’s game plan worked well, we knew they had good players who could hurt us, but if you don’t take your chances when you’re on top, you give them a chance. The game should have been put to bed by half time.”

With two home losses to open the season, and a trip to reigning champions Shelbourne this Saturday afternoon, bouncing back from a difficult opening to the season is made more difficult.

“Ideally, you want to bounce back straight away, and we’re confident in the way we’re playing, we have two brilliant young midfielders in Aoife and Eva playing alongside Becky Cassin, and our midfield were excellent against Sligo. You want to keep those performances going, but Shelbourne is a different test which we have to adapt our game plan for.”

“It’s a tough task, but training has been great again this week, all the squad are up for the trip to Tolka. Everyone will up their game a little playing the Champions and we know what we want to do up there, we’re happy in how we’ve played for long periods in both our opening games, but we have to be ruthless in front of goals and cut out little errors because Shelbourne have players that will take advantage of any errors. We’re looking forward to it though, these are the games you look for when the fixtures come out.”