Derry City Women perform the great escape!

Hard work, patience and determination all paid off recently for Derry City Women, who won three successive league games recently to guarantee Premier Division football for another year.

The Candystripes lost 13 games in succession and looked headed towards relegation, with luck and form in very short supply all year. But proving that in football especially, nothing is ever guaranteed, the girls dug deep and produced the performances and results needed at a critical stage of the season to secure their safety with two games to play.

For manager Paul Dixon and his team, who came in at the start of the year, it was an overdue reward for the team’s efforts.

“With us being in new this year, it obviously took a bit of time to get the standards and the culture that we wanted implemented,” he explained. “It was 13 games in a row and 13 losses, then we picked up three wins in a row to keep us safe. Everyone had written us off with five games to go because we were sitting on zero points, but we knew that with the hard work that the girls were putting in, it wasn’t going to go unrewarded. We identified a few games where we knew we could get points in and the girls put absolutely everything into it.”

The 4-2 away win at Ballymena Allstars on August 30 was massive for Dixon, his staff and the players, with the task of winning the first game huge psychologically for everyone.

“Considering that the girls haven’t won any games in the last few seasons, it’s hard to explain, but it just brought a real momentum shift in the girls. They knew the kind of work they were putting in and the amount of work they had to do off the ball in other games they were losing. But after that first win, you could sense that wee but of confidence coming into training. Winning and losing are both habits so if you can get into a winning one, you can add another one to it.”

There wasn’t anything particularly different that day in Ballymena, other than everything clicking for the players individually and as a team.

“The message was that we needed some of the girls to become big players and big characters,” Dixon explained. “We knew that we had all the tools to be able to do it, but we just had to get the girls sharpened up. They have worked hard every single game, so it would be wrong to say that they turned something on in one game, because they have been doing this now since the beginning, since we came in. Hard work takes a wee while to pay off and I think it was just paying off at the right part of the season.”

Successive victories

Having finally won one game, the girls then went on to put another four goals past Mid-Ulster before winning 2-1 away at Larne, taking them to nine points and incredibly, safety.

“One of the girls actually mentioned that they had scored more goals in two games than they did all of last season,” Dixon recalled. “That comes from the hard work that the girls put in and the confidence that they had.

“You don’t realise it, but the amount of dedication and commitment that the girls are showing every single week, it was just a matter of time before the results came. There is so much accountability and the girls haven’t missed a beat. At any level of football, if you lose 13 games in a row, there’s an element of downing tools, but we haven’t seen that at all, the whole season, not from one girl.”

Those three wins have energised everyone after so many successive defeats, and even though the winning run ended with defeat to Sion Swits last week, they go into tomorrow’s final league game at Lisburn free of pressure.

“It’s an unusual one because three or four games ago, we were talking about how we wanted to get into a position where we would go into the last game with something still to play for, with the possibility of staying up.” Dixon explained.

“The girls have now got the points they needed with wo games to spare. Friday is a game that we know we don’t have to get points out of, but we still want to get points out of, and we have set the girls the target of now finishing in double figures, so we have to keep the thing going. Whatever happens on Friday it’s going to be the last memory going into pre-season next year, so we have to keep going.”

The season ends tomorrow, but for Dixon and his team, the work is still in the early stages.

“We had to look at it from the girls’ point of view, from where they were last season, and they did need picked up,” he concluded. “It was never going to be a thing of coming in and just hammering people, you had to keep it accountable and you had to get the enjoyment back in the football as well.”