St Mirren Women head coach says players deserve great credit for battling through tough season

dailyrecord.co.uk:

Head coach Kate Cooper believes her St Mirren players deserve great credit for battling through to the end of an incredibly challenging season.

The Paisley club find themselves towards the bottom end of the SWF Championship South table after a difficult run of results, caused in large part by coronavirus robbing the club of several players thoughout the last few months.

Two other teams in the league - Clyde and United Glasgow - have withdrawn from the division having experienced similar problems with player numbers.But St Mirren Women have battled bravely on, recently taking to the field against Falkirk with just nine players to avoid another cancellation.Cooper feels the tough experiences have helped bring the core of her squad closer together.And she hopes that will stand them in great stead for the end of this season and their next campaign.Cooper told Express Sport: “It’s been a tremendously difficult season with coronavirus still playing a huge part.“The first year of the pandemic we lost a lot of our players who went to join bigger clubs, which cost us a lot of talent and momentum.“We’ve had to rebuild two or three times already this year alone.“When we played Falkirk a few weeks ago we only had nine available players.“We couldn’t afford another cancellation and so we challenged the players we had to go out and defend as well as they could.“To be fair we only lost 3-0 and we didn’t concede for the first 25 minutes.“I think that performance gave the girls a real lift.

They fought for each other and showed a huge amount of commitment to the club.“I think it spurred them on and brought us even closer together as a team.“Clyde Ladies and United Glasgow have both folded and some people might have thought it would have