Prêcheur pleased with London City Lionesses’ collective effort in win at Southampton | OneFootball

London City Lionesses head coach Jocelyn Prêcheur said that the overall team performance was the most pleasing aspect of his side’s 1-0 victory over Southampton last night.

Maddi Wilde’s late goal fired The Pride to a narrow victory over The Saints in Eastleigh as they got their Women’s League Cup campaign up and running.

Speaking to WSL Full Time after the match, London City Lionesses boss Prêcheur gave his overall assessment of the game. He acknowledged the difficulty of the challenge of building a team with new players and a new coaching philosophy, but he was pleased with the collective effort from the group.

“We know the difficulty of the challenge for our club,” Prêcheur said. “We need to build everything at the same time. We have a lot of new players and I don’t complain for sure, but we also need to create some connections.

“We need to create some automatism with a new coach, a new way of playing. Quite different from what they were doing in the past, so they need to understand. Of course, it takes time, nothing is perfect, but my feeling is step-by-step, we are imposing our philosophy.

“We try to play as a team and this is probably what I will remember from tonight.”

Prêcheur made multiple changes at the start of the second half. He acknowledged that it is always challenging when multiple players are substituted at the same time, however, he commented that the substitutions were part of the plan and brought experience to the team.

He said “It’s always hard when we change three players at the same time, specifically after half-time, but it was a plan from the beginning.

“Unfortunately, we have too many injured players, so we need to manage that. My priority was to give a chance to other players; they need to play, they need to improve. We have a lot of young players and I think when you use Chantelle [Boye-Hlorkah], Julia [Roddar], they are such experienced players, so they bring their experience and they also brought a physical impact defensively speaking.

“The good point is that before and after the substitutions, we kept going to play the same way, so it means that they’re starting to understand how we should play.

“Of course, the road is still long, we still have a lot of things to improve. It was far from perfect tonight, technically speaking, but at least defensively, I think we made a good game and it’s proof we are starting to play very well together.”

London City Lionesses return to Barclays Women’s Championship action this weekend when they host Portsmouth at Hayes Lane.