Club news

Brazil: We Are Making Progress

By Jake Ketley • 13 December 2018

Brighton & Hove Albion forward Ellie Brazil believes yesterday’s 4-1 win over Yeovil Town Ladies in the FA Continental Tyres League Cup shows that the team are making progress.

Brazil was pleased with how the team acquitted themselves in what could have been a tough away trip to Dorchester.

She said, “We came down here with the ambition to win because we wanted to get through to the next round and we’ve accomplished that.

“Away games are always harder, you have to prepare yourself mentally and physically days before because of the journey, but we conducted ourselves well and scored a lot of goals, the most we’ve scored away from home in a match this season.

“We’re making progress and this match is a good sign of that.”

The England youth international opened the scoring for the Seagulls after 15 minutes and reflected on her goal, as well as the tough group the team managed to qualify from.

“I saw that the defender was keeping me onside and it was a perfect ball by Fliss [Gibbons] to pick me out.

“It came at me and I knew where the goal was, I thought if I could just swing a foot at it, I might get lucky which I did.

“We weren’t in an easy group and it was supposed to be quite a tight one, but we’ve proved ourselves to everyone else that we can compete, and no one should rule us out or see us as underdogs because when we are playing well we can put on a good show.”

Albion now head into a three week winter break before their next fixture away at Liverpool on Sunday 6th January, and the 19-year-old believes it will help the team regroup and put them in the position to attack 2019.

“All the players are adapting from second tier to top-tier football, which is a completely full-time programme so it’s hard for everyone to adapt to that completely in this time frame. The break will be nice for us to come back and start from fresh again.

“We’ve handled the first half of the season well but we’re looking to progress a lot further in the second part.

“After what we’ve started to build over the past few months, we think that 2019 could be quite bright for us.”