Crystal Palace head coach Laura Kaminski was disappointed to see her side come away with nothing after they were defeated 3-2 by Aston Villa at Villa Park on Sunday afternoon.
My Cato fired The Eagles into the lead in the Midlands before goals from Anna Patten and Rachel Daly turned the game in Aston Villa’s favour. Annabel Blanchard levelled for Crystal Palace with four minutes to go, however, Ebony Salmon popped up with a winning goal for Aston Villa in the fourth minute of stoppage time.
When speaking in the post-match press conference, Crystal Palace boss Kaminski shared her frustration with her side’s late defeat.
“We know we have to manage those moments in the game better,” Kaminski said. “We’ve done so well to take a top side [all of the way] and stay in the game but it’s frustrating that we take nothing home with us. We maybe deserved to get something over the line, but it just shows in the final moments of these games that if you don’t do it right, you get punished. Their last goal is a quality finish and quality build-up and we haven’t dealt with it.”
Kaminski then went on to praise her team for their attitude and being able to push Aston Villa right until the very end.
She said “I have a great group in terms of problem solving. I thought the messages at half-time, in terms of what they delivered and what we asked them to do, how they applied it, eventually came to fruition a little bit later. If you keep doing it for long periods of the game and we did; we managed to get the ball down and play which was positive because we deserved the chances we created and we had the ball for a long period of time. There were a couple of early chances for both them and us, so the game could have swung either way.”
Kaminski went on to highlight how important the whole squad have been in building the team’s impressive performances so far this season.
She said “It’s not just the starting XI, the bench has offered impact now across a few weeks. They’ve shown consistency, they have understood their roles and they’ve felt confident when they’ve come on the pitch. I think that’s a credit to the group and now we know the next piece to work on.
“One thing I will say, a positive for us, is that when we’ve had problems in the past with things and fixes we want to work on, the group react really quickly and learn at a great speed. I have a group that don’t hide away from those problems and they’ll want to fix it so that later down the line, we get what we deserve and it’ll feel good to ride out the last 10 minutes of a game in the future and bring something home.”
Crystal Palace are next in action on Sunday afternoon when they play host to Charlton Athletic in the Women’s League Cup.
