McLauchlan wants to carry on the good work

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After a successful first half of the season Albion are back in action on Saturday in the FA Cup.

Heather Miller

2025-01-08T06:00+00:00

Best foot forward: Rachel McLauchlan is looking forward to the second half of the season. 📷 by Kyle Hemsley.

Rachel, did you have a nice break before the second half of the season starts?

"It was a quiet Christmas spent with my family, but I really enjoyed it and it was nice to be back up in Scotland for a bit.

"I think it's quite nice to have a refresh. We put a lot of work in during that first half of the season so it's quite nice just to go away and see your family, especially for the players living further away that don't see them as often."

Have you taken some time to reflect on the first half of the season?

"I think we started off really well. We had a good run of games and we got some good points on the board.

"There are still areas we want to work on and do better in, and I think we can put that into practice for the second half.

"The squad are just really excited to get straight back to it. There are some tough games coming up, but that's a good thing. We're fresh and we're ready to go, we're just looking forward to being back on that pitch, no matter who that's against.

"It's about all of us working to the same standard no matter who we're playing and we're just ready to go."

This is Albion's best ever start to a WSL season. Do you and the squad take confidence from that?

"You can look at those achievements and use them as confidence. We've worked really hard this season and we can be proud of that, but we need to perform like that in the second half of the season. It's very important to then set your sights on that and go from there.

"As a player you want to be on the pitch as much as you can. I knew coming in as a new player that the girls we had here were really good and it was a very competitive squad, which is a good thing to have. As long as we're winning I'm happy."

Do you feel you've established your identity?

"It was going to take some time right at the start as we had to understand how we wanted to play, but we managed to get that quite quickly. We're a close-knit group of players, which has helped massively.

"Everyone gets on so well off the pitch and I think that's helped us on the pitch make those connections and relationships with your teammates.

"The new coaching staff, and the principles that they want to implement, have come across really well. All the girls took it on board very early and that's shown on the pitch."

How do you feel after drawing Durham and Arsenal in the cup competitions?

"We're really excited to have those games, especially with Durham at home this weekend. Every team's going to be right up for it and each game's going to be really difficult to play.

"We learnt a lot from that Arsenal game at the Emirates and we put it into practice in the matches that came after that. We still took positives from the game, but there's certainly a lot that we needed to do better and we didn't perform at the standard we had now set.

"I think it's exciting to be playing Arsenal again so we can put that right. We know we can do better than that."