The FA Cup holders Manchester City saw off the challenge of a new-look full-time Leicester to set up a semi-final showdown with the 14-time winners Arsenal on Thursday night. The winner of that tie will be odds-on favourites to lift the trophy, after Emma Hayes’ all-star Chelsea side were stunned by Everton at Goodison Park on Sunday.
There, French forward Valérie Gauvin, who joined from Montpellier in the summer, scored the winner as Everton recovered from Erin Cuthbert’s early goal, their first coming from a Lucy Graham header, to set up a semi final with Birmingham or Brighton.
Cup upsets in women’s football are rare and getting rarer. Occasionally, at best, a mid-table Women’s Super League side may get the better of one of the division’s top sides, as Everton demonstrated on Sunday, but teams below the fully professional top flight just don’t stand a chance. For Leicester, the odds were marginally better than usual. Over the summer, freshly under the wing of King Power, the Championship team went fully professional themselves and recruited 13 new players. Inadvertently thwarting their ambitions of turning over Manchester City, though, was the rule that only six new recruits could be registered for the rescheduled tournament’s close.
“Every club in the transfer window has different parameters and different requirements they needed to do,” their manager, Jonathan Morgan, had said in midweek. “Our requirements were that we went full-time. That means we had to do a bigger overhaul of players.” While a more moderately strengthened City were untroubled by the rule, Morgan had to pick and choose who to have in contention.
One player that took a step down to rejoin her childhood club, the former Reading midfielder Remi Allen, shone at Quorn FC’s Farley Way stadium. Despite the difficult task ahead, she hoped to pass on her experience of pulling off a previous major upset to lift her team against Manchester City.
“When I was at Birmingham we beat Arsenal in the quarterfinals of the Champions League, over two legs,” she said. “We were very, very, very much the underdogs. They had Kelly Smith playing for them, the big, big guns, and I think it’s just having that real togetherness, that real fight and that real desire.‚”
With Allen captaining Leicester in the absence of Holly Morgan, this attitude showed in the first 35 minutes when Leicester nipped at the heels of their opponents, pressing hard whenever out of possession.
Unfortunately that aggressiveness would open the door for City on the windy 3G pitch from which rubber crumbs flew into the air with every bounce and roll of the ball. And City took the lead after a pass played into the feet of Georgia Stanway in the centre of the box ended in a tangle that saw her fall to the ground. The winger Chloe Kelly smashed in the resulting penalty.
Less than 10 minutes later City doubled their lead as Ellen White’s header into the path of Stanway who lofted it over the out-of-place keeper Demi Lambourne.
Leicester though, could find solace in the fact that they then not only held strong, but pulled a goal back. After Millie Farrow was fouled in the box up stepped former Arsenal and Manchester United forward Charlie Devlin to reduce the deficit. Leicester may be out, the goal small reward for their efforts, but more importantly to their WSL ambitions they showed they can go toe to toe with the elite.
In the other quarter-final, Birmingham edged out Brighton on penalties after a lively 2-2 draw at Crawley. The visitors twice took the lead inside 90 minutes, only to be pegged back both times, with Denise O’Sullivan grabbing the second equaliser in stoppage time.
Neither side could find a winner in extra time, with the Blues prevailing 4-2 in the penalty shootout to set up a semi-final against Everton, with an unexpected trip to Wembley the prize at stake.
