Elena Sadiku and Emma Lawton prepped for Chelsea challenge

Celtic F.C.

·19 November 2024

Elena Sadiku and Emma Lawton prepped for Chelsea challenge

The games, and big games at that, just keep on coming for Elena Sadiku’s side who are down in London preparing to take on Chelsea at Stamford Bridge tomorrow night (Wednesday).

And part of that preparation in typical UEFA Champions League style is the pre-match press conference at the home of the hosts, and the Head Coach was joined by Emma Lawton at the West London venue to meet the media.

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The Celts were on the wrong end of a narrow 2-1 scoreline to Chelsea last Wednesday at Celtic Park with a performance that the Ghirls can take great heart from.

Hoops defender, Lawton is among that number and, for her, last week was a case of going from Petershill to Paradise, as the former Partick Thistle player explained what she would have been doing on a Wednesday night 12 months ago instead of playing at Celtic Park and Stamford Bridge.

She said: “I would have been at Petershill training with Partick Thistle.

“It’s really exciting, even three months ago I would have been at Petershill training on Wednesday night so it’s been such a great journey and I’m just really excited.

‘In the Champions League, playing against some of the best players in the world is, for me, what I want to do.’

“You want to go and challenge yourself and learn as much as you can, so that’s what I’m looking forward to.

“They are very good, they are challenging, with different movements and their abilities are unbelievable, so I’m just doing my best to stop them if I can.”

The Head Coach is looking forward to the challenge also, and said of the game last week: “Obviously we were really happy with our performance after the first leg.

“I think also we’ve been growing into the competition, so how we played against Chelsea last time obviously encourages us to grow even more.

“I think we’ve been defending really well in all of the games.

‘What the players have learned the most is about being more brave and confident, especially in possession.’

“So that’s something that we want to do again, and tomorrow night we’ll see how Chelsea line up. I think we kind of know what to expect from Chelsea tomorrow, but we want to do better and better, so that’s up to us tomorrow.”

She added: “Obviously coming into the competition for the first time ever for Celtic, we knew that it was going to be tough.

“It was going to be hard, especially with the teams that we have against us, so we are really learning during the competition.

“Obviously, we want to win, that’s our game-plan. We always want to make sure that we go into a game to try to win. But I feel that the performances have been improving during the competition, so hopefully we can get some points soon enough.”