Rehanne Skinner was pleased with the performance from West Ham United women's team as they forced Adobe Women's FA Cup holders Chelsea to extra time in their fourth round tie on Sunday afternoon.
Viviane Asseyi opened the scoring on 18 minutes with a fantastic strike into the bottom of the net, as the forward latched onto a ball down field from Mackenzie Arnold.
From their, the Irons defended resolutely, limiting Chelsea to half-chances up until Mia Fishel managed to find space inside the box and fire beyond Arnold with 20 minutes of normal time to go.
In extra time, Erin Cuthbert and Aggie Beever-Jones added further goals to ultimately seal the tie for those in Blue.
It was a typical hard working performance from Skinner's team, who had performed well at Kingsmeadow in the league meeting between the two sides back in October. They did so again here, hustling Chelsea and restricting them to very little until extra time began.
The West Ham manager was full of praise for the way that her side went about their business in west London...
I'm really pleased with the performance from the players today.
We led the game for 70 minutes, and it took them 101 minutes in the game to actually get in front of us. That's against the champions and the holders of the competition; this is a tough place to come.
I thought we showed grit and determination, we worked incredibly hard for each other and created some chances.
The players did what I asked of them. They have it everything and that's all you could really want from a game like today.
We played with no fear out there.
The players made a brilliant start to the game, making sure that we put them under pressure and we didn't back off.
We expect Chelsea to have a lot of the ball and create chances, but actually, one of the best thing about today was the control from the team, the mindset and the desire to play.
We had little spells where concentration levels drop and tiredness sets in, and you have those little moments where you need to try and kick on again.
We absorbed the pressure really well and we never really looked like we were panicking despite the fact we faced some pressure. All of those things helped us build resilience.
We were delighted to have Shelina [Zadorsky] and Katrina [Gorry] available for us today.
They've done everything that they can to try and affect the team and have been brilliant. They've only trained with us for just over a week, and it's a big ask for them to then play minutes for us today, but they stepped into that really well.
You can see the quality that they have, and their experience and leadership is going to really help us.
We also had Emma Snerle making her first start for us this season as well, so we're starting to get some of the squad depth back and fit as well, which is really important.
Since the start of the season, there's always been that work ethic.
Everyone has been working really hard and we're moving forward. There's always been that desire to play when we want to play, we're creating chances and increasing the possession that we're having and we're getting more bodies on the grass.
Moving into the next couple of weeks, I think we're building on what we said at the start of the season.
It was always going to be a process, we were going to need to develop the squad and we were going to need to evolve the team. We want to take that into the league games and make sure we get some points on the board.
