Katie McCabe praised our form after we stretched our unbeaten home run to 15 competitive matches with a victory against London Bees on Wednesday night.
The Republic of Ireland international scored a hat-trick in the 9-0 victory, which saw us progress to the knockout stages of the FA Women’s Continental League Cup.
We spoke to McCabe after the match and this is what she said:
on returning from injury…
The injury was unfortunate, it was just something small and just a niggle which was quite frustrating. Then I got ill on top of that. We were saying last week that I had killed two birds with one stone, by kind of missing the one game. I was buzzing to be back and I was delighted with how the team performed tonight. The young kids came in as well and they’re doing great as well so we could give our old veterans a rest tonight to be ready for Sunday.
on the home form…
This is our home, we want to make a statement every time we play here. It’s a terrific park to play on and it allows us to play our football. Obviously with the 11-1 game against Bristol City standing out this year, it was fantastic although it was the one game I missed out on! We want to make it hard for teams to come here and we want to make it hard for teams to beat us. At the time, our only loss in January was annoying but we’re looking to make it hard now for teams to come here.
on Joe Montemurro’s absence…
We do miss his head being around, his big smiley face and his presence. Aaron and Lianne have come in and done a terrific job this week and we’re looking forward to finishing the year on a high now on Sunday.
on the match against Everton…
Yeah of course [we expect it to be tough], it was a tough game last year as well. They do make it difficult and they’ve started the season really well, Willie Kirk is a good manager and he’ll have them really well organised. They have some good players in their team so it will be a tough game on Sunday but we’re looking to finish on a high this year.
on maintaining the high standard across all competitions…
Of course it’s important. The competitiveness, even in training, we could be killing each other at times but in a good way. We just demand the best from each other and that’s what creates a winning team and we have that winning mentality. It was frustrating for us to lose in the final of this tournament last year so we’ll be looking to move on into the next round with confidence. Hopefully we can regain the trophy this season.
on the group stages…
It was great [to top the group], of course we lost in the Continental Cup to Brighton on penalties and after that result we wanted to make a statement and finish top of the group. It was by all means not easy tonight, we needed to come out and perform because we weren’t going to be gifted the three points tonight.
on the feeling at half-time…
We knew we needed to come out and not be complacent. They had threats up top and great pace in behind, so we really needed to manage the game. We had the quality going forward but we needed to make sure we were solid in defence as well to get a clean sheet.
on scoring a hat-trick…
I was getting some stick from Beth [Mead] before the game because I hadn’t scored yet because I’m playing in a deeper role this year. I’ve not been up too far on the pitch and Beth, Danielle van de Donk and Vivianne [Miedema] have been scoring all the goals so it was nice to get up and running with the three tonight. What’s important now is going into the next round, not my three goals, it’s about the team’s performance.
on the defensive performance…
Anything can happen in cup games, they were quite quick but I think our defence was solid enough to deal with what they had. Even Louise Quinn coming back in after not playing a lot of games did a terrific job as captain as well. It’s been great to have her and Emma Mitchell back on the pitch.
on the changes to the team…
It’s not hard to adapt with different players. It just shows the strength in depth of our squad, we’ve been trying to play with each other every day in training so we’re quite used to it.
Copyright 2024 The Arsenal Football Club Limited. Permission to use quotations from this article is granted subject to appropriate credit being given to www.arsenal.com as the source.
