CORK City Women’s assistant manager Paul Farrell admits his side needs to do better following their hugely disappointing 3-2 defeat to Munster rivals Treaty United on Saturday afternoon.

Goals from Sarah McKevitt and a Becky Cassin penalty weren’t enough for City to salvage anything from the game as they slumped to their fourth defeat in a row at Turner’s Cross.

Worryingly, their winless run at the start of the season stretches to eight games to leave them bottom of the Women’s National League table.

“It’s a hard one to process,” said Farrell. “In fairness to Treaty, they came, they brought a certain gameplan, a certain intensity and they put us under pressure. 

They disrupted our style of play which is fair play to them but we need to be better than that.

“We need to compose ourselves better than that because we are better than that, we can play better football than that.

“In patches of the first half, I thought we moved it ok, in the second half there were probably five- or 10-minute spells but not enough.

“We have a few coming back from injury and we are trying to build their fitness, we have a few that were playing a lot of minutes then because of the injuries so the fitness might have played a part in it.

“I think the girls have been very good over the last couple of weeks, their fitness has been good and they’ve been managing their loads so they should’ve been fresher than that, that’s not an excuse I don’t think.

“We should be fit enough for any team in the league whether it’s Treaty or any other team around us it doesn’t matter, we should be able to compete.

“We have certain player performance goals and team goals that we want to set and obviously we have not reached them at the moment.

YOUTH POLICY

“We are building towards something and I think a lot of the young players coming up are doing well, they maybe need more match time and experience.

“It is disappointing where we are but we are playing the way we want to play, we just need to put it together for 90 minutes as we go on and we will get there.” 

City’s miserable afternoon was compounded by Katie McCarthy sustaining a serious-looking knee injury in the closing stages of the game with manager Rónán Collins unavailable to interview post-match as he accompanied his fiancé to hospital.

“It’s really disappointing. Katie is just back from an injury herself and was doing really well, she was making an impact when she was coming on in the games.

“It looked like quite a serious injury but we have no update at the moment so hopefully, it’s nothing long term but we will just have to assess it,” concluded Farrell.