There wasn’t a blade of grass that Katrina Gorry didn’t touch at Ashton Gate on Sunday afternoon.
The Australian midfielder was everywhere, racking up well over 11 kilometres of distance during the 2-1 victory, West Ham’s first of the calendar year and ‘Mini’ was at the heart of everything for Rehanne Skinner’s team.
It was an afternoon where resilience was once again needed to be shown. After Honoka Hayashi had arrowed in a strike on 13 minutes, Amalie Thestrup pulled one back just after the break.
The response from the Hammers was brilliant, with Viviane Asseyi showing composure to slot the ball beyond Shae Yanez to put her side back in front.
From there, Gorry and co defended everything that was thrown at them, putting their bodies on the line countless times during the closing stages to preserve the three points.
The No22 was delighted to help the team to the first victory since she arrived in east London…
The girls put in a big shift today.
Every single player went out there and did a job, whether they started the game or when they came on – we all worked tirelessly.
Today all came together, everyone had each other’s back, and we all knew what we had to do. We had a gameplan and we stuck to it. I’m super proud of all of the girls.
The team have worked so hard for this victory.
I haven’t been here from the start of the season, but you could feel how much it meant to everyone, how badly they’ve wanted it and how much they’ve put in.
I even felt emotional, and I’ve only been here a couple of weeks. This team has something special about it, and we’re building something special too.
It feel like today is the start of something new, and it’s emotional, but also exciting. We can take a lot of confidence out of it.
We stuck to the gameplan today.
Everyone was working so hard. If somebody missed a tackle, then someone was there to back them up. That was the kind of mentality that we had in the game.
We knew that it was going to be scrappy in patches, and we know that we would have to be patient at times.
I think the variety in our game was really good today. Sometimes we went direct, other times we made good combination play. The more variations we’re able to make, the better it is.
We didn’t panic today; we knew that we would have opportunities and we took two of those to win us the game.
This is a good starting for us to move forwards.
We go into training next week and we keep building. There are things that we can pick up and change, but this win is a good starting point. It’s exciting to pick up three points now heading into the next couple of weeks.
