Man City 5-2 Spurs, Women's Super League | Martin Ho's verdict

Martin Ho felt it was ‘a game of two halves’ after a much-improved second half display but the damage was done in the first half as Manchester City ran out 5-2 winners in the Women’s Super League on Saturday afternoon.

Khadija Shaw netted a 20-minute hat-trick to charge the home side into a 3-1 lead, despite Olivia Holdt finding an equaliser after she opened the scoring early on, before Kerolin and an own goal from Amanda Nilden gave us a mountain to climb in the second period.

We came out fighting and showed plenty of character to push the league leaders, carving out a number of opportunities that we could have capitalised on another day, before we eventually managed to pull one back late on through Bethany England.

Speaking to SPURSPLAY, our Head Coach said: “A game of two halves, exactly what you said. The first half, with the competing and duelling and fighting, it wasn't there.

“We had moments with the ball where we thought we'd done well and maybe could have capitalised on a couple of them. But, the second half, it was a totally different team; aggression, forced more errors out of them technically, forced them into areas we wanted to be and really stepped on with some purpose.

“Then with the ball, I thought we were brave and when we broke through them well, we had numerous chances, probably could have had a couple more with the goals with the chances we had. But just disappointing because we can't have that first half.”

Reflecting on a positive second half display, Martin added: “If you look at the second half, there's so many aspects to take, and we should probably take the positive aspects from it, because we've pushed that game second half a lot. We've had numerous chances with really good, sustained possession. We have a talented group and a talented team, and we just need to use these experiences more and more to grow in confidence.”

While we’ve suffered our second successive defeat in the competition – the first time we have done that this season – Martin doesn’t want the last few weeks to overshadow the progress made this term.

“It's going to take still some time to really adapt players, but we've been in a good space,” he told us. “We can't let these things derail us and make it look like we've had a bad kind of season because, actually, we've still got four games to go in this league campaign and we can be competitive in those games because we show it in lots of spells. We just haven't had that consistency through a large game against a top team. We've just been one-half and we need to probably go towards 70, 80 minutes of those games.”