Huddersfield Town Women lead title race once more after 2-0 win over Chester le Street
Goals from Jess Lightfoot and Laura Elford sealed another three points as the Terriers to return to the top of the league.
Huddersfield Town Women returned to the top of FA WNL Division One North after a hard fought 2-0 win away at Chester le Street.
The victory meant Town capitalised on Leeds’ failure to beat Durham Cestria to move a point clear in the title race with a game in hand as we enter the business end of the season.
Manager Glen Preston admitted his side are where he wants them to be and it’s up to them to ‘break the spirits’ of the chasing pack with only five games left to go..
He told We Are Terriers: “We’re in a great position. We want to dictate the table. We’ve said that from the off.
“We want everyone else chasing us and we want to win every single game. We need to break the spirit of Leeds, Cheadle and the others with every win we get.
“But we can only do that by focusing on ourselves because this league is so difficult. Chester could have definitely got something out of today and you’ve seen Durham get a draw at Leeds.
“Anybody can take points off anybody. So it’s massively important that we stay focused. It’s five cup finals but we turn our attention to Chorley next week and that’s all we need to think about at the moment.”
On yet another pitch barely fit to play on, Town once again had to adapt, especially as the game was looking to run away from them. But just as they’ve done all season, they found a way.
Town dominated proceedings but just couldn’t find the final product. So, with legs tiring after a three game week, Preston made changes with 15 minutes to go and it worked.
Rhema Lord-Mears went through one-on-one and saw an effort saved by the ‘keeper but the ball popped out and fell to the feet of substitute Jess Lightfoot who tapped it into an empty net with eight minutes to go.
And the point were sealed two minutes later. Lord-Mears’ corner fell to Lightfoot whose volley was blocked on the line before Laura Elford took a touch and smashed it into the bottom corner.
After the game, captain Beth Stanfield praised the ‘mindset shift’ in the team.
She told We Are Terriers: “It’s a really tough opposition who are fighting for every point but we always have belief that we’ll score.
“We’ve had a bit of a mindset shift of still believing. Even if it gets to the 89th minute we still believe we’ll get a chance and score.
“We just know we can grind results out and we know we can get the wins.
The win also sees Town extend their clean sheet record to six league games in a row. And Stanfield says it’s not just scoring goals the team have belief with.
She added: “We just have a real desire to not concede. If you don’t concede you’re going to win points, whether it’s one or three.
“I think that’s been the real big shift from last season. Hopefully we can keep it going until the end of the season because that’s the foundation for us to build on.
“Then we can let the attackers do what they do and put the ball in the back of the net.”
Next up for Town is the visit of Chorley on Sunday 29 April at the Stafflex Arena.