Montemurro - How we blew Liverpool away

Joe Montemurro was a happy man after seeing his side kick off the new Women’s Super League season in style with a 5-0 win against Liverpool.

This fixture came off the back of the international break, after which a number of key squad members were struggling for fitness - but despite this, our heavily rotated side produced a fine performance. So how did we do it? 

“We’d seen a little bit of Liverpool and the way that they play, and we felt that we could overload in certain areas and be quite dominant,” Montemurro told Arsenal.com.

“We’re always going to have a lot of the ball - that’s our nature and our style - it’s just a matter of making it proactive and positive for the way that we want to play.

“I suppose it’s an addition to last year’s work when Katie McCabe and Lisa Evans played as attacking style full-backs, and Sunday was the perfect day for it because Liverpool played with wing-backs, so our ability to get forward and exploit the spaces was there.

“We look to create lines of passing all over the pitch and aim to position ourselves in important areas all over the pitch. We had numbers going forward, and a lot of numbers in good positions. 

“They weren’t sure which player to take and which player not to take, and as I keep on saying, when you start pulling players out of position and bringing other players into position, and then you start rotating in and out of areas, it’s very hard to mark. 

“We’ve made a mental goal to make sure that the league is the most important thing this year. We want to win the league and that’s what really counts. Cups are important and they’re fantastic, but the reality is that for us to be the team that we want to be, we need to be up there in the league, so the focus on the WSL in every game is very important.  

“I’m happy because Liverpool are a really good team and they’re not the team that maybe came out on [Sunday].”