Charlie Ball didn’t play football in her first year of University, but has taken the plunge in her second year. Ball isn’t one to shy away from playing, she’s previously played for her local women’s football team based in Worcestershire. Playing club level football from the age 14, I asked Ball about her personal targets ahead of the season:
“To build up strength, to increase my ability and to try and get on the ball. I get more out of assisting rather than scoring, so i hope to contribute to the team in any way possible. And, i properly would like to improve my fitness each week, as 90 minutes in my first game yesterday was really challenging”.
The Women’s second team started their league campaign yesterday away at Southampton Solent university’s women’s team. The newly formed second team squad, travelled down to the south coast with 12 players. They struggled massively, with next to no match fitness and no subs, the Second’s were defeated 7-2.
I asked Ball if there were any positives to take from the defeat against Southampton Solent women’s second team on Wednesday afternoon:
“Obviously the two goals that we scored. This is the first time we’ve played together as a team training has all been together, including the first team. So we haven’t really had any time to get to know each other properly, apart from socials, which some people haven’t even been attending. For our first match together despite the result I think there’s still positives to take away.
Getting to know people’s names because we haven’t played as a team together. First half, we played really, really well. We dominated, got a goal pretty early on. They equalised late and then early on in the second half, we got a goal. There was lots of encouragement and just building each other up. We didn’t let our heads fall, even though obviously we lost 7-2. It was just a good kind of starting point”.
Next up for the Women’s second team is a trip to Bristol women two’s who beat Southampton two’s 3-1 in their opening fixture.
I asked Ball how she expects the side to respond after yesterday’s heavy defeat:
“I think we’ll know what to expect. Obviously, that was our first match and again, we’d never played together as a team but I think we’ve got a couple of weeks now to train and better ourselves so we’ll get to know each other better, I think that will help to improve our team play.
Obviously our coach has now seen us play properly in a match situation, I think that will definitely help us in terms of personalising skills and stuff in training and hopefully we’ll have more subs for our next game. We only had one sub but obviously she was injured so we used her at the very end but a lot of our team couldn’t make it as they hadn’t done scat tests and paid money for membership yet, everybody’s done that now so hopefully we’ll have a bigger turnout in two weeks time”.
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