Spurs 1-0 Leicester (WSL) | “It’s an important win” | OneFootball

Robert Vilahamn was pleased to begin the new year with a 1-0 win over Leicester City in the Barclays Women’s Super League on Sunday afternoon.

With nearly five weeks without any competitive football, we made the perfect start at Brisbane Road as Amanda Nilden’s low cross saw the Foxes’ goalkeeper Janina Leitzig turn the ball into her own net after just four minutes on the clock.

The lack of football in recent weeks was evident for us while Leicester, who played in the week in the Adobe Women’s FA Cup, looked livelier as the game went on in the capital, with Janice Cayman and Missy Goodwin squandering big opportunities.

Digging deep to keep the visitors at bay, at the other end, Bethany England was inches away from adding a second in the closing stages of the game as her 30-yard strike struck the underside of the crossbar, but the early opener was enough to secure the three points.

Debutant Lize Kop put in a commanding performance inside the box against her former side to keep a clean sheet for the second time this season in the WSL.

“A great win, I mean it’s an important win, but a very rusty performance,” he said. “You can tell we haven’t played for around five weeks and you can tell the relationships, the technique and details are not there. But to win, score that goal and keep a clean sheet, I’m taking that every day.”

Robert on the early goal…

“Maite with some nice dribbles just before that and, you know, Amanda is an offensive full-back coming over and doing that cross, obviously it’s a mistake from their goalkeeper but we take that, how we created that goal chance is how we want to create those chances.”

Robert on a big few weeks…

“We have so many games coming up so to get a win is really important. We knew we haven’t played in five weeks, we knew it would be tough, but now we can build some sort of self-confidence for the next game. We can use the squad to make sure everyone is quite close to play and get minutes, then we get a really good group dynamic from that as well. It’s three big games coming up so it won’t be hard to motivate ourselves.”

Robert on Lize Kop’s debut…

“I mean three training sessions to build relationships and being that calm, playing to the centre-backs and full-backs, made some good saves as well, it’s a really good debut for her and I guess she’s really happy to win against her former team.”

Robert looking ahead to West Ham…

“It’s a quarter-final, it’s a big game, we’re going to play here at the stadium with our fans behind us. We know it’s always tough games against West Ham, but we really want to reach the semi-final so we’re going to do everything we can on Wednesday."