Sunderland host Manchester City Women in their first home fixture in FAWSL1, after shocking the women’s football world with an opening day win away at reigning champions Liverpool.
Carlton Fairweather’s side now welcome the superstars of Manchester City to the Hetton Centre on Wednesday 1st April.
Nick Cushing’s City will hope to avoid being made to look like fools, but the Blue’s boss has warned of the danger that their new opponents pose. “Sunderland are a good side and are in the league on merit, so we can’t go into the match with any sort of complacency”.
Cushing will have had plenty of time to analyse Sunderland’s impressive 2-1 win, in which Beth Mead proved to be the stand out performer. The young English star grabbed the headlines with the first WSL1 goal of the year before then winning the penalty that doubled the lead.
Manchester City captain Steph Houghton will miss the tie against her home-town club through injury, whilst goalkeeper Karen Bardsley looks set to be banned for 3 matches after being charged with violent conduct by the FA following a nasty altercation with Birmingham striker, Freda Ayisi.
Local girls, Demi Stokes and Jill Scott will likely feature in the visitor’s line-up, meanwhile Sunderland may give a debut to new signing Suzanne Mulvey. The Scotland International spoke to the official FAWSL website about her excitement for the fixture.
She said: “As a new player I really can’t wait to experience that home environment with all the fans coming down and I’m sure we’ll get a good crowd. Manchester City will be a great test for us as one of the biggest teams in the league”.
“I wanted to come to this league because it’s so competitive with no weak teams and plenty of very quick players that always cause problems but I’ll take it one game at a time for the first few weeks”, she added.
