Crystal Palace manager Dean Davenport was full of praise for his side’s first half performance despite slipping to a 9-0 Vitality Women’s FA Cup fifth round defeat to Arsenal at Meadow Park yesterday.
The Eagles were eventually heavily beaten by their top tier opponents in Boreham Wood but they kept the scoreline at 1-0 for 41 minutes in the first half.
Speaking in the post-match press conference, Palace boss Davenport praised his side for the way in which they started the match.
“To be one-nil down after 41 minutes I thought was outstanding, the game plan kind of worked,” he said. “It is never easy coming to Arsenal with the players that they have got and the set-up that they have got here. I thought that the girls did really well to defend as long as they did without conceding.
“It’s a learning curve for all of us. We will go back and dissect what has happened and it will make us a better side in the future.”
Leah Williamson, Katie McCabe, Vivianne Miedema and Jill Roord all came on for Arsenal within the first 15 minutes of the second period and Davenport admitted that those changes made the task all the more difficult for his side.
“Those players that came onto the pitch as substitutes are some of the best players in Europe so we always knew that it was going to be difficult,” Davenport added. “It was just a question of how long we could last before the goals started to come. Arsenal’s movement is tremendous and they’ve got fantastic players.
“For 41 minutes, we did well to contain some of that. We didn’t really concede from the corners and this season we have conceded far too many goals from corners, I think there were something like 17 corners in the game today. That was one thing that we worked on all week but with the movement and the players that Arsenal have got, it was inevitable that at some point they would start hitting the net.”
Crystal Palace ended the FA Women’s Championship season in seventh position, their highest finish yet in the second tier. While the club exited the Vitality Women’s FA Cup at the fifth round stage, they were FA Women’s Continental League Cup quarter-finalists for the first time in 2020/2021.
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