HIBS LADIES captain Joelle Murray admits that she is desperate to end Glasgow City’s run of league titles and she is confident that 2018 could be the year that her team manages it.
Last year, Glasgow City won their eleventh consecutive SWPL trophy, going the entire season unbeaten, but Hibs gave them a run for their money until the Glasgow side pulled away in the last few games of the season to take the title.
However, Murray is confident that physically, her side is in great shape and have the beating of the Glasgow side in the 2018 SBS SWPL, which begins on the 11th of February. “We’re so desperate to stop Glasgow City’s run,” Murray told Herald Sport at the launch event of the SBS SWPL ’18 at Hampden Park yesterday.
“All credit to them, to win the league eleven years in succession is a great achievement but we want that to be us. We want to break their dominance and I think and hope that this is the season that we can do that. I’m feeling really excited about this year – we’ve been in pre-season since the 4th of January so we’re feeling good.”
Hibs may have fallen short in the league last year but they were in impeccable form in the cup competitions, winning both the Scottish Cup and the Scottish Premier League Cup and defeating their great rivals Glasgow City in both finals. Murray admits to being somewhat perplexed as to why her team have been so dominant in the cups yet cannot replicate those performances in the league. However, she is optimistic that the confidence her side has gleaned from their cup victories could give them the extra push they need to get over the line in this year’s SWPL.
“I think we are getting closer to having the level of consistency that we need to win the league,” the defender said. “I’m really not sure why there’s such a difference in cup and league results.
“I don’t know if it’s a mentality thing – the cup games are obviously one-off matches whereas maybe the girls feel under a little bit more pressure in the league games because the results of those games obviously impact so heavily on the outcome of league.
“But we know that our style of play is something that can work against Glasgow so we just need to make sure we produce the performances when it matters.”
While Murray may be feeling like there is the possibility of a changing of a guard in the coming year, Glasgow City midfielder Hayley Lauder is equally confident that her team can extend their record-breaking run of league title wins even further.
And she admits that since returning to training after their Christmas break, she and her teammates are using the thought of their twelfth consecutive title as motivation - although she is also aware of how beneficial it is to the sport in this country that the competition is becoming stiffer year on year. “The record is definitely in our heads and we want to keep that going - that’s our main focus,” she said. “We might have won it eleven times in a row but it gets tougher every year, it really does and while that makes it harder for us, in the long-run, that’s good for Scottish football. If you want to produce a good league, and one that people want to watch, you can’t have one team so dominant. We know it’s going to be a hard year because on top of domestic games, we’ve got the Champions League and then there’s the international stuff but we’ve had a good break and so I’m looking forward to getting going again.”
While Lauder admits that the league title is her team’s priority, no one at Glasgow City is happy about their lack of cup titles over the past few years and regaining the cup trophies from Hibs is most certainly a driver for everyone at the club.
“We want to win everything and we would love to get the cups back off them,” Lauder admits. “The competition is far greater now than in the past so we know how tough that will be - but that’s what we’re targeting.”
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