Leicester City manager Lydia Bedford said that she was reasonably pleased with her side’s second half performance against Manchester City at The Academy Stadium this afternoon.
The Foxes went down 4-0 to The Cityzens, three of those goals were scored in the first half. Leicester City conceded a penalty kick in the second half but other than that, they largely restricted the hosts to half-chances.
Leicester City have been on the wrong end of some very heavy scorelines in recent weeks and manager Bedford was pleased to see her side remain solid against Manchester City after going into the interval 3-0 down.
“It’ll sound surprising but I’m reasonably pleased with what our players produced,” Bedford said when speaking in the post-match press conference.
“We’ve had a tough run of three games, the Chelsea loss and then the Arsenal one. We are looking for progression and it was a bit disappointing that we couldn’t stay more competitive in the game for longer, it was disappointing to concede twice at the end of the first half.
“What was really important to us today was that if we got ourselves into a situation where it was two or three and we were unlikely to come back from it, how our girls would then manage the rest of the game to make sure that it didn’t then become five, six, seven, eight, nine as it has previously, that was the real big focus. I’m reasonably pleased to only concede one goal in the second half and to keep it down to 4-0.”
This season has been a campaign which has seen Leicester City learn so many harsh footballing lessons. Bedford went on to say that the club must develop two different strategies to enable them to compete with those teams around them and restrict opportunities for those sides challenging high up the table.
She said “I joked before the three games that it was going to be a month of wearing a tin hat and just see what happens. They probably haven’t done anything that I didn’t expect them to do.
“From my perspective, when we lost at Chelsea in the FA Cup in February, we started that game with the same high pressure that we had done against some of our previous counterparts in the league and it worked. Reflecting on the last three games, I would probably say that when you are up against teams who have 18-20 senior international players, our style of football probably needs to adapt, we probably need to look at the season in two different ways. We need to focus next season on the teams who are in and around us and be really competitive and take points off those and we need to get better at damage limitation against top, top teams.”
Leicester City return to action again next Sunday when they welcome Reading to The King Power Stadium.
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