Hayley Crawford: I believe

Our match against Brisbane Roar was one of our best performances of the season yet we still somehow came away with zero points to show for our efforts.

Credit to the Roar though for showing a never say die attitude and that is the reason why you can never write off a team that has achieved so much throughout the history of the Westfield W-League.

We came out ready to play against the Roar and took what I thought was a deserving lead to head into the sheds full of confidence and 1-0 up. We knew that to win we had to match it with them all over the park and we did that for the first 45 minutes.

The second half started well but Brisbane started to gain some momentum and we stopped doing the little things that worked so well in the opening half.

The roar equalised through Amy Chapman and from there I think we dropped our heads a little and belief that we could win evaporated.

The game was a great contest but unfortunately for us our luck ran out again and the Roar left with three points in the kit bag. We spoke after the game about how important it was to put two solid halves of football together and I’m full of hope that we can go down to Canberra this Saturday and display the quality football we played against Brisbane in the first half.

I believe if we can do this for the full 90 minutes we will get a much needed result from a team who overran us in the final twenty minutes of the game last time we met.

Another solid week of training will have us in good shape to meet the challenge come Saturday...
See you at the game

Read Hayley's other columns for The Football Sack!

Club Captain for Westfield W-League side Newcastle Jets, Hayley has represented Australia at many levels including the Matildas. Catch the W-League every week at your local ground or if you can't make the game watch it on ABC1.

This season, the Newcastle Jets launched a Facebook page just for their W-League team, be sure to like it.