Sunday afternoon saw Charlton Athletic lose their first home game in the Women’s Championship of the 2024/25 campaign against Southampton. Tara Bourne’s close range gave the Saints victory at The Valley.
After the game, manager Karen Hills spoke about her team’s performance.
Hills expressed her disappointment in the outcome of the fixture: “Yeah, I'm disappointed because I thought we’d done okay. We played well, and we were solid in defence. We knew they had some fantastic players. They're a good side. We needed to be at our best today, and we were. It was just one error, I guess, that separated two very good teams.”
Hills acknowledged the fine margins of the match, saying: “It was two very even teams and there were definitely chances at our end where we could have made a little more from it. I go back to talking about wanting to be hard to beat today and we were, I thought we were well structured and defended well, unfortunately, it’s just those key moments and just small margins in games when two very good sides are playing against each other."
Looking towards the next match Karen shared: "We’ve got two weeks now to prepare and to review and to make sure we’re ready to go against Bristol. It gives us a chance to look at ourselves, but it doesn’t change. We don’t change. We are a good side. We stayed with the game until the last minute we had that belief and we’ve come from games in the past where we’ve come back and we all had that belief that potentially we could have done that.”
Discussing the weeks ahead, Hills noted the importance of hard work, stating: “We will get our heads down and we will work hard. We’ll stick together and we’ll continue to work on all the aspects of our game that we need to improve on. The girls will be ready to put on a performance against Bristol in two weeks.”
(Article by Lloyd Hassell)
