Scott Booth offered up his views at full-time after his Aberdeen Women side fell to a 2-0 defeat at home to a strong Hearts side despite an improved showing.
“I don’t think we were far off in the first half either, to be honest. Maybe just a little bit here and there, but we certainly made a couple of mistakes in the first half, which were really costly. Of course, that makes it a real challenge when you’ve lost a couple of goals fairly early on in the game. But I thought the players handled it really well. I didn’t think even at 2-0, we were out of the game. I said that to the players at halftime, and we set out in the second half to press that bit higher.”
“We had the wind, so it was good to go and put Hearts under lots of pressure. We don’t want to be losing games by high score lines. We set out today to be organized and difficult to beat, but at the same time, we also wanted to be better in possession. I felt like that was one of the things we struggled with in the first half. We were winning the ball back at times, but we just weren’t doing anything with it. So when you come out in the second half and press high and are better in possession, then we create chances. The chances we created, we should have taken. You’re talking about being a yard or two yards out, and we’ve got to score. If we score them, we put Hearts under real pressure, and the score line may be different.”
“I think Fran, Darcie, and Jo brought a little bit more energy into the second half. Particularly because we were pressing so high, it takes a lot of energy to do that. Fresh legs were the reason for it. I think it worked really well. I just said to the players: it was a positive performance. Keep up the spirit. We’ve been doing well; just keep it going. I’ve mentioned a couple of mistakes, a couple of missed chances, but their energy and work rate were excellent. You can’t question that at all from them. On another day, if we’d taken our chances, we might have come away with three points. In the second half, Hearts found it very difficult to hurt us in any way.
“It’ll be good to get a little bit of space and time to reflect because it’s been a whirlwind coming in. We started with a week of three games, and then we’ve had some tough games. But we’ve won a couple as well, which has been good. I can now reflect on that. We’re back here for the cup next. I’m looking forward to that. It would be nice to get a positive result in that one. The team deserves it. They work so hard, and it would be good to see this stand sold out. That would be nice.”
