Manchester City head coach Gareth Taylor was full of praise for Australian international Hayley Raso after the player came off the bench to star in The Cityzens’ 5-0 victory over Aston Villa at The Academy Stadium this afternoon.
The winger came on for the last 26 minutes of the match, scoring two goals and creating another, as Manchester City recorded their first home win of the season in real style.
When speaking in his post-match press conference, Manchester City head coach Taylor paid tribute to Raso on the back of an impressive shift from the player.
“She did great and not just her goals,” Taylor said when speaking to FAWSL Full-Time. “I think I’m especially pleased with the pick out for Lauren (Hemp) at the back post.
“In Hayley we have got an exciting player who has got bags of pace and bags of energy. If she gives the ball away she gets it back very quickly which is what you want and what we have challenged her with is picking people out in the final third.
“On too many occasions, she got in and she was too loose in her final product so it is great today that she has come on and been a threat and she has also backed that up with connecting with our players in the final third.”
Manchester City were frustrated by a well-drilled Aston Villa side in the first half with chances being at a premium. Despite The Cityzens’ frustrations, Taylor said that his side had to believe that they would eventually make the breakthrough in the second period.
“You have to believe,” Taylor said. “Some days it does happen, some days you come away frustrated so you have to believe.
“I think it’s about having enough about us to continue (to attack). Sometimes, we have to be patient in these moments, it is really tough. It is easy for us to say from the sidelines ‘be patient, keep moving the ball, keep moving the opposition’ but you have to consider the physical and technical actions that they have to make from closing down. The possession stats are massively high which is what we expected anyway.
“It is not easy to grab that first goal. If you score early on which I think we did in January, you score in the first few minutes and then you get the second and the third one, but this game is completely different. This is why teams do it (play defensive), I get it, they feel that it is the best outcome that they have to get a result. At half-time, they will have been especially pleased with what they were doing.”
Manchester City now have a great opportunity before Christmas to record further league wins against struggling Birmingham City and Reading and qualify for the quarter-finals of the FA Women’s Continental League Cup.
Speaking about the pre-Christmas objectives, Taylor said “It is about building on this, although we won’t see some of the players for a couple of weeks.
“I just think it was vital that we won today and I said to the players at the end that we need to use this when we come back, remember the feeling, remember the positive energy that we showed and most of all, I spoke to them about how brave they were in the way that they played today. It is easy sometimes to just help balls on and stick it in the box but we haven’t really got players in that make-up to play that way.
“We still have a lot to do, we have a lot to do in terms of the way that we play it, especially refining those key details but the signs are really good, the signs were really positive today and the response was good, it was great to get a clean sheet for Karima (Taieb) and we move onto the next game and look forward to it.”
Manchester City return to action on 12 December when they travel to Birmingham City in the Barclays FA Women’s Super League.