Tottenham Hotspur head coach Rehanne Skinner said that her side deserved their controversial winning goal at Manchester City last night.
Lauren Hemp headed Manchester City into an early lead at The Academy Stadium before Rachel Williams fired home a second half equaliser for the North Londoners. The game looked set to end in a 1-1 draw until Spurs snatched a controversial winning goal four minutes from time. Rosella Ayane clearly committed a hand ball as a cross came in before the ball hit Steph Houghton and then the post before rebounding into the net off the unfortunate Manchester City goalkeeper Karima Benameur Taieb.
When commenting on the incident in the post-match press conference, Spurs boss Skinner highlighted the fact that the goal came from her side creating a goalscoring opportunity.
“I thought we’ve earnt an opportunity;” Skinner said. “Obviously, we’ve created a crossing situation and from that we have managed to take a chance against a side who are very difficult to break down.
“We’ve created several chances in that phase of the game so I thought we earnt it. From what I have seen, it’s a cross and it looks as though Roz (Ayane) has tried to head it and then it has dropped to us.”
Spurs have now won both of their opening games in this season’s Barclays FA Women’s Super League and Skinner admitted that she was incredibly proud of her side’s achievements at The Academy Stadium last night.
She added “I told the players at the end that I am really proud of them. When you go into games like this, you have to be prepared to do the hard yards, you’ve got to stay in the game and be really disciplined and organised, frustrate the team and make them give us the ball.
“For us, that was our intent to make it really, really difficult. In order to get points and results against teams in the top three, we have to go about it in a really diligent, dogged manner and we did that today. We knew that if we got that right, we would definitely create chances for ourselves and we did that and we were able to take them today which was fantastic.”
Tottenham Hotspur return to action after the international break when Reading are the visitors to The Hive.