Vidosic: Win over Durham fully deserved

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2025-01-29T21:55+00:00

Dario Vidosic's team won their first game of 2025. 📷 by Paul Hazlewood.

Dario Vidosic believes his team fully warranted their 4-1 win over Durham in the fourth round of the Women's FA Cup on Wednesday night.

Dario, what are your initial thoughts on the game?

I am pleased with the overall performance, we controlled the game very, very well. We scored some goals, probably could have scored a couple more, but it was good to get that [result]. I thought tonight was an opportunity to find that rhythm a little bit. We looked a lot better with the ball. It gives us a good stepping stone now for this weekend's game [against Palace].

The likes of Bex Rayner and Dejana Stefanovic got more minutes under their belt, you must be pleased with that?

I am extremely pleased. There was an opportunity tonight to give a couple of girls who are on restricted minutes, who haven't played as much or are returning from injury. So it was a positive night overall with everything combined. It gives us more options and more headaches for myself! But it was really good.

It felt like your team didn't really let up at all over the course of the 90 minutes...

We applied ourselves very well. We tried to control the game, especially in the second half. Once we had the result secured, we probably slowed down the tempo a little bit. We wanted to speed it up in the final third, but I think we managed the game well, especially with the workload that we've been under.

It was important that we tried to take all the transitions out of the game, to try to reserve our energy as much as possible, to get ourselves away from harm's way and injuries. We'll still find some stuff to improve on, which is always the process and what we want to apply, but it was a good match. We recover and get ready to go again for the derby on Sunday.

Tonight marks the first win of 2025. It must be a good confidence boost after three matches without a victory?

It's always good to win. I thought even in the three games we weren't that far off - it was more us than the opponent, we just didn't get our football going and that hurt us. We're a little bit unfortunate with some goals. A couple of goals came from our own mistakes and then that sort of dents the confidence. So tonight helps put the week behind us.

It can happen. It's just one week of football where unfortunately there were three good games and we couldn't get anything out of them. But I think tonight we got a good performance and got the result. It was well warranted with the performance and that's what we just want to build on and to keep focusing on that.

Crystal Palace next, how exciting is that contest going to be?

Especially for the fans. They've always spoken about it and you felt it on the men's side as well when they've played each other. I think it's one both sets of fans really look forward to, especially ours.

We had a win against them in the first game and now they'll come to us trying to change that, trying to get their revenge. We've got a tough opponent ahead of us. It's going to be a tough game again, like the first one was. So we will recover well, get ourselves ready and we'll be ready for Sunday.