Aston Villa’s defensive stalwart Natalie Haigh believes that new head coach Carla Ward’s on the pitch attitude, demanding consistent high standards from her players, is exactly what the team need going into their second Barclays FA Women’s Super League season.
Speaking in a pre-season media day in which FAWSL Full-time were present, Haigh described her excitement at playing under her ‘open and honest’ new manager.
“She wears her heart on her sleeve, she’s a bag of energy, always laughing and joking off the pitch;” Haigh said. “She’s the kind of person that will always have your back, and I think that will rub off in our performances as you want to get results for your manager.”
Ward will be hoping to help her new side build on last season’s 10th-place finish, after The Villans narrowly avoided the drop with a fantastic final day goalless draw away at Arsenal, something Haigh is hopeful they will be able to achieve.
“Anyone who watched us last year knows we had a very slow start, we know our performances weren’t good enough;” she said. “But it was a true test of character and show of what we were about towards the end of the season when we needed to get results to stay up.
“I’d like to think that this year, we won’t put ourselves in a position that we need to do that as drastically around the end of the season.
“I think in the WSL. it’s a lot around momentum. If you can gain momentum and put points on the board from the start of the season, you can feel a bit more comfortable and confident going into performances, whereas when you lose as often as we did and put the pressure on yourselves around Christmas time, it’s a hell of a job to do the rest of the season.”
With further progress and development in mind, the club have yet again shown their commitment to their women’s team this summer, making a mammoth 10 new signings. Of the 10, standouts include Hannah Hampton, Sarah Mayling and Meaghan Sargeant, the trio poached from local rivals Birmingham City, as well as Australian international Emily Gielnik, a marquee signing up front.
This commitment was highlighted by Haigh, who said “I think people are taking note of us as a club in terms of the signings we’ve made and the direction the club is going. We have everything we need to be a WSL club, we’ve just now got to put the performances together on the pitch and show that to the fans.”
Villa’s season begins at home to former FA Women’s Championship rivals Leicester City this weekend. The newly-promoted side will provide quite a different challenge to last season’s opener against Manchester City, but despite this, Haigh is wary of underestimating The Foxes.
“I don’t think it’s going to be an easy game at all;” she emphasised. “I think Leicester will potentially be a bit of a surprise package this year as a newly-promoted team who have signed some very good players and have a very professional setup, so I think we’d be stupid to go into the game thinking we are going to walk away with three points easily.
“It’s an exciting game, one we are looking forward to. We’ve had some good contests with Leicester over the last couple of seasons in the Championship and friendly games and with Remi [Allen] coming across to us, there’s a bit of rivalry there in terms of old teammates. There’s no easy game in this league so we’ve got to prepare to go into each game and fight for the three points.”
Most importantly, today’s fixture marks the return of the Villa fans and their first league trip to The Banks’s Stadium, despite it being the West Midlands side’s second season making the Walsall ground their home. This milestone is certainly not lost on Haigh, who told us, “Walsall’s a ground that needs fans, it’s as simple as that and we’re super excited to make that our home this year.
“In the Championship-winning season the fans were our 12th man and in a little ground like Boldmere [St Michaels], their noise made such a difference. We loved interacting with them, we loved their support and really missed it last year, especially towards the end of the season where they could’ve been a really big boost for us.”
Aston Villa welcome Leicester City to The Banks’s Stadium today at 12.30pm with the game being shown live on the FA Player.
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