All the way down to 10 towards a Manchester Metropolis facet wolfishly looking down our third-place place – the final of the Girls’s Tremendous League’s European slots – with the sport locked at two targets apiece, it was sink-or-swim stuff.
Melvine Malard had levelled for the Reds minutes earlier, however a second yellow card for Aoife Mannion, simply seconds after that objective, immediately shifted the competition into one other new part: defence versus assault. Hunters towards the hunted.
Some would possibly describe what adopted as ‘determined defending’. However this United Girls group merely do not do determined defending – these ladies would in all probability choose the phrase ‘delectable’.
As a result of what adopted, through the remaining 20-plus-five minutes, was the Reds’ season in miniature: an impassioned burst of collective resilience, pushed by what captain Maya Le Tissier later described as a sheer “love” for the artwork of defending.
It ended with the clinching of a season-long objective: qualification for the UEFA Girls’s Champions League subsequent time period. And there might be extra to come back nonetheless, with a 3rd FA Cup closing in as a few years looming earlier than the top of Could.
Proper now, we really feel like celebrating the whole lot of this loveable squad. However, seeing as our TeamViewer Trending sequence leads on people, it feels applicable to place ahead the skipper – the younger, driving drive behind this most collective of soccer groups…
