London Bees 0–9 Tottenham Hotspur on 30 August 2023

Robert Vilahamn was delighted to see his players turn build-up play into goals in our latest pre-season exercise on Wednesday night.

Our new Head Coach spoke of the need to create and convert chances after Saturday’s goalless draw with Aston Villa Women in a behind-closed-doors friendly at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium – and he saw that in abundance as we scored nine goals without reply in a 60-minute training game against London Bees at Enfield Town’s Queen Elizabeth II Stadium.

“We’re working on a way of playing and a game model, and sometimes you need this kind of game to work on that,” he explained.

“This was good because they were fighting their best but we could still keep the ball and score a lot of good goals. We kept the level up for the whole 60 minutes with defensive work and attacking football and we tried to implement the game model all the time, so how we attack, how we are patient in the build-up, how we try to find those chances, and the finishes were really nice with some really nice goals.”

Celin Bizet had us 2-0 up inside 11 minutes, finishing a good move involving Ashleigh Neville and Kit Graham at the second time of asking four minutes in before Jess Naz teed her up to double her tally.

Graham (14) and Angharad James (17) scored from distance, with Graham unselfishly setting up Naz (20) for a close-range finish, before Graham slotted across the goalkeeper and into the net after a ball over the top from Olga Ahtinen just prior to the interval (29).

Graham continued to be heavily involved as we added to the scoreline later in the game – she won the ball back out wide and crossed for Grace Clinton to get on the scoresheet (40), with the same two players combining again for Clinton to double her tally five minutes later. Neville rounded off a 9-0 win with a fantastic volley from James’ cross-field pass in the 48th minute.

“If you can have those working relationships where you get to know each other and how you want to play the ball to each other, then I think that’s the main thing,” added Robert. “Trying to figure out how we can make this team have good teamwork but also ensuring they know how they play on the field is really important to me so this kind of game is good.”