Manchester City head coach Gareth Taylor has warned that his side must not be complacent when they face Manchester United at The Leigh Sports Village in the fifth round of the Vitality Women’s FA Cup on Sunday.
The Cityzens defeated Manchester United 1-0 in a Barclays FA Women’s Super League fixture a fortnight ago. It was a game in which they were dominant despite winning by just a single goal.
When speaking ahead of the latest Manchester derby, Manchester City boss Taylor warned that his side must not be complacent.
“The stakes are high in these kind of games,” Taylor said when speaking in his pre-match press conference. “If we are honest, it’s probably a quarter-final or a semi-final game in terms of the magnitude but it has probably come a little bit early. They always say that to win competitions, you need to beat the big teams along the way.
“They’ll want to strike back after the last game and it is really important for us that there is no complacency and that we don’t just turn up and expect to perform. We need to work really hard like we did in the last fixture with and without the ball to be really effective.”
While Manchester City were on top against Manchester United in their last game, Taylor said that he would like to see his side score more goals this time around.
He said “I’d say that we should’ve been three or four goals up, it certainly shouldn’t have taken a wonder-goal to win it. That’s the game, it is won and lost in both boxes. If you are efficient at one end and really stingy at the other, you’ve got a real chance.
“The win was the big thing for me psychologically and the reward as well because the players deserved that. Of course, we have talked about the areas where we need to improve on to make that a little bit more emphatic because I think we deserved it.
“We know that we are going into a tough game on Sunday and there is probably going to be some retribution wanted from the opposition, I get that as we would be the same. We need to make sure that we control the game in the same way that we did previously. We know the amount of hard work and concentration that it takes but we are more than capable of doing that.”
Manchester City’s Vitality Women’s FA Cup fifth round tie at Manchester United kicks-off at 12.30pm on Sunday.
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