Beard calls for Liverpool to make new home a fortress going into 2024/2025 campaign | OneFootball

Liverpool manager Matt Beard says that his side need to make their new St Helens home a fortress this season.

The Reds kick-off the new Barclays Women’s Super League campaign with a fixture against Amandine Miquel’s Leicester City at the Totally Wicked Stadium on Sunday afternoon.

Liverpool have relocated to St Helens over the summer after several seasons playing the majority of their home games at Prenton Park. Commenting on the change of stadium when speaking in the pre-match press conference, Liverpool boss Beard highlighted the club’s ongoing commitment to the women’s team whilst emphasising the importance of making St Helens a tough place for opposing teams to go.

“When we turned up, obviously the stadium’s dressing room for the girls, it’s a permanent dressing room,” Beard said. “It’s a fantastic facility, I think it just shows a commitment from the club. Melwood last year, St Helens this year and playing three games at Anfield, so it just shows the direction that we’re going in. I’ve always said that infrastructure is so important and I think we’ve now got all of that right. I think from that side, we’re looking forward to playing here and kicking on.

“If we look at Prenton Park, teams didn’t like going there. It always used to make me laugh when managers would turn up with their coach and their staff and they didn’t know where to go and they were moaning. I just think it put them in a negative mindset before the game.

“We made Prenton Park a fortress, so we need to try and do the same at St Helens.”

Looking ahead to the new season, Beard said that his side are excited to get going and that they will be looking to build on last year’s results.

He said “We’re looking forward to it. It seems like an eternity since we played Leicester at The King Power Stadium back in May, so we’re looking forward to getting started.

“We had a bit of a dress rehearsal last week against Everton at St Helens, so we managed to get ourselves familiarised with the new stadium. I’m looking forward to getting the season started.”

Liverpool are arguably ahead of schedule after finishing last season in fourth place in the Barclays Women’s Super League table. Beard says that the aim is to now push for a top-three position.

He said “We worked incredibly hard in the games and I think whenever we had a negative result, we went on a good run after that. We’ve got a really, really good base and foundation.

“For us, we want to do as well as we can, so our ambition is to try and break into that top three like anyone else. I’m not going to sit here and say, all right, yeah, we’re going to do that. We’ve just got to see what happens on Sunday and then we will go from there.”

“We want to do as well as we can. We want to win trophies, we want to compete.”

Liverpool’s Barclays Women’s Super League fixture against Leicester City kicks off at 2pm on Sunday afternoon. Tickets remain on-sale and can be purchased by clicking here.