Wanderers Women’s Manager Myles Smith praised his side character and resilience in grinding out a 1-0 victory over Atherton LR Ladies on Wednesday evening.
Lily Barnes’ confident penalty was enough to secure the points on the evening – and back-to-back home wins – and kickstart their season in Division One North of the North West Women’s Regional League in positive fashion.
Whilst Sunday’s season opener was a free-flowing and attacking based 6-0 win, Wanderers’ boss Smith was under no illusions of the battle his side faced at the Dreams2Reality Stadium on Wednesday evening.
“First of all credit to LR,” he said.
“They came here and really gave it a good go and put us under a lot of pressure – causing us big issues and a massive challenge on the night.
“But I think we made hard work of it. It wasn’t a clean or a nice game and one of those matches that people would say is ‘nitty, gritty’ but credit to the players for getting the three points in that type of game.
“I said to the girls at half time that the performance wasn’t good enough and we needed that second goal to kill the game. However, when you don’t, that means you come into the last twenty minutes with your backs against the wall when the other team are applying pressure.
“Look - we have a young team here and although they are young in age, that game has shown that we’ve got a very experienced team and a side full of good characters. If anyone questioned their character because of their age, I think they answered that superbly tonight (Wednesday).”
Following two success on their own patch, Wanderers face a trip to the west coast in the form of Fleetwood Town Wrens Ladies Reserves.
Whilst it’s been a heavy workload for the women’s team under club operations for the first time, Smith is happy in the progress made in such a short space of time.
“I would have preferred to have another couple of weeks of pre-season but I think we’re there or there abouts and I know we’re definitely not our best at the moment,” he said.
“We know that this squad can be better in games but we can’t complain as we’re two from two, with clean sheets in both and seven goals too – I can’t complain about that.
“These fixtures in the first part of the season are coming thick and fast and we know that may be the ‘norm’ for some, but it isn’t for this group at the moment.
“So we’ve said to the girls that we can’t get complacent. We have to recover well, train well and get ourselves ready for Sunday. “