Surrey stay undefeated but Jess Garland remains hopeful in her young Team Bath side
After a busy week for both sides and a lot of positives to take from their games, read Jess Garland’s and Tamsin Greenway’s match reaction to Friday’s game and how things are shaping up for the rest of their FNSL campaign. With Surrey Storm taking an early lead against Team Bath head coach Tamsin Greenway was satisfied with her team’s performance, especially taking such a convincing lead. She said “We got a win. It’s really hard, we got 65 goals again, which is brilliant but I still want to hit the 70 mark. I think it’s really difficult when you go 21-7 up in the first quarter to keep pushing on, but I question any team that can then go on to win another quarter by 14. We muddled through; we worked it out, won the game.”
With Greenway’s side being so experienced and with some great combinations on court it wasn’t surprising that Team Bath had a challenge ahead of them. Greenway reflected on her team’s positive performance. “Getting Kat Ainsworth out on court was fantastic for us, she stepped up today, and she has just recovered from a broken finger, so it was really nice to get more combinations out there. I know my defence are really disappointed with some stuff, but I was really pleased that the things we’ve been working on are starting to come into fruition. I’m disappointed with our attack end at times because I thought we should have been tougher out there and I thought we made some stupid errors at stupid times, but again we spent three quarters of the game coasting.
“It will be interesting to see whether Bath make the top four, but it’s nice to play against young players, you know we’re getting a lot of stick at the minute for being the experienced team but as I was saying before I’d love to have an 8 year old programme, 10 year old programme, where we’re getting young players through each week. I’ve got experienced players that have never been through programmes like this that I’m trying to teach new things to, so it’s great to come here. I’ve seen what some of our lot need to do, I’ve seen more combinations and it’s great to get a win and you know three wins from three is not bad to start us off.”
Jess Garland was also positive in reviewing her team’s performance. Admitting the first quarter had room for improvement the Team Bath head coach doesn’t doubt her team’s ability for the rest of the season. She said “I think the second, third and fourth quarters were really good, very competitive, obviously a big disappointment was the first quarter. I think we had more than enough possession, we proved that we can turn the ball over against teams of that quality. We missed too many shots and therefore the score crept out to a margin that it shouldn’t. We could see how well the team responded with an immediate win of the second quarter and then only losing the second half by two; that’s really encouraging, but you know we’re not here just to make the numbers up and this has to be about development and winning and we need to make sure that in the remaining fixtures we actually come out with the wins as well.
“I thought Yasmin Parsons in her first home game for the season did really well in quarters two and three. Equally, I felt Amanda Trounce improved on her performance from the other night. So I think, in a week where the turnaround has been a couple of days, it’s been really encouraging to see what is a new team. We can see how well they’ve responded from the disappointment of Monday. It’s fantastic, but like I said, it means nothing if we can’t go on and win games from this now.”
With only losing by 10 to Northern Thunder and 13 to Surrey Storm Garland remains hopeful in an unpredictable FNSL 2012. “I mean there’s no reason why we couldn’t have won any of these first three other than the fact that we made too many errors at one time in the game which has then cost us, so you know there’s a real competitive area around mid-table so I think there’s a whole bunch of us that could either get into the top four or find ourselves riding down to the bottom.”
Match reaction courtesy of Tia Skinner on behalf of England Netball