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Women's team striker Jess Battle and manager Luke Podmore overjoyed with stadium semi-final win

F.C. United Women continued their impeccable 2017/18 campaign this afternoon with a 6-0 Argyle Cup semi-final win over CMB Ladies. Striker Jess Battle scored five of United’s six goals on the day, with captain Kirsty Chambers completing the scoring on her 100th game as captain of the team. In-front of an impressive crowd of 212, inside the main Broadhurst Park stadium, the Reds continued their defence of the trophy by booking their place in the final, for the second successive season.

Having taken her tally for the season to 45 this afternoon, Battle was impressed with the Reds’ overall performance. "It was really good, especially getting the chance to play on a pitch like this - I couldn’t think of anything better. Of course it helps that a couple of the goals were put on a plate for me, so a big thanks to the girls for that!"

After scoring five of our six goals this afternoon, Battle was quick to praise her teammates’ showing and insists that the Reds are all taking eachother to the next level here at Broadhurst Park. "It’s been amazing to play with these girls this season, we all just click, there’s no ’odd-one-out’. We all get together and just want to win as much as we possibly can, be a team and like Luke [Podmore] said, be part of a project together."

Today’s win was the Reds’ second appearance of the season, inside the main Broadhurst Park stadium, having started the Argyle Cup defence with an 11-0 win over Penrith AFC Ladies back in October. Battle sees it as a pleasure to get the opportunity to play in the main stadium. "It’s really good, the fact that the pitch is like a carpet helps a lot with our football and the way that we like to play because it’s very much one touch passing and switching it often. That helps and then obviously the fans singing in here, it just creates an amazing atmosphere for us as players to play in."

Like Battle, manager Luke Podmore was delighted with the result and the overall performance from his side, this afternoon. "I’m really impressed. We started a bit slow, first half, obviously we’ve played a lot of games over the last few weeks so I think that might have caught up with us a little bit. We had a bit of a chat at half-time, came out and took the game away from them [CMB]."

Having only gone into the break 1-0 up, United scored five in the first 20 minutes of the second half to put the game out of sight for the visitors. Strong second half showings are becoming a trademark of Podmore’s side this season, the manager insists that it is the basics of the break that has helped the Reds’ over recent weeks. "It’s just a natural time to re-group and it’s good to remind the players what we’ve been working on. It’s good obviously to be able to give my input, on the side that we’re playing, to the team. Of course, we might have seen it differently from the sidelines, to the players on the pitch so it’s good to bring all of our ideas together and then we can go out in the second half with a fresh mindset and we tend to do really well from there."

A win in this afternoon’s semi-final booked the Reds’ a place in their second successive Argyle Cup final after winning the trophy last season. Theoretically, United only stand two wins away from what would be a phenomenal treble-winning season, having retained the County Cup just over a week ago. With just three points needed to win the league title and an Argyle Cup final to come, Podmore is eagerly anticipating the next few weeks. "I’m really excited about it. Obviously we can now wrap up the league on Wednesday [25th April] which will be really nice to get that in the bag. Then we can literally turn all of our attention to the Argyle Cup, we’re then 90 minutes away from winning the trophy again. It could be a really interesting game, we’ll go there with our best intentions and obviously we’ll be trying to win the game. Of course, it’s going to be a really tough game [vs Stockport County LFC] but I think we’ve definitely got enough and we’ve shown that over the course of pre-season and the regular season. It will just be a case of getting everybody focused on that day, to perform on that day and if we can do it, it’ll be an amazing achievement for everyone at the club."

The Reds’ are set to face Stockport County LFC in the final after the Premier division side beat Burnley FC Ladies 2-1, in the other semi-final last weekend. Despite beating CMB this afternoon (in the same league as Stockport County), Podmore believes that it gives United no kind of psychological advantage having beaten a number of sides from that (Premier) division already this season. "It’s nice to say that we have beaten teams from higher divisions but at the end of the day it was a cup game, the first half showed that anything can happen. If we do go up next year, which I think we will now, it’s going to be tough to keep that consistency going. With it being a 90 minute game, anything can happen so we just have to make sure that we are on it, on that bank holiday Monday [7th May] and we’ll see what happens."

You can see if Luke Podmore and his F.C. United side can wrap up the league title away at Curzon Ashton LFC (St Matthew’s RC High School, M40 0EW), on Wednesday night - 6.30pm KO.

We hope to see you there!

By Mikey Partington


First Posted ~ 20:07 Sun 22 Apr 2018
News ID ~ 7868
Last Updated ~ 00:47 Tue 16 Feb 2021