Liverpool travel to Goodison Park to face Everton on Women's Football Weekend; Matt Beard's side lost the reverse WSL fixture at Anfield 3-0 in September; watch Everton vs Liverpool live on Sky Sports Football on Friday night from 7pm; kick-off 7.30pm
Friday 24 March 2023 23:43, UK
“We froze. We looked scared. The occasion got the better of us.”
Liverpool manager Matt Beard is remembering the last WSL Merseyside derby at Anfield. The Reds were two down to Everton after just over 30 minutes and a late third compounded an afternoon to forget on what was meant to be a momentous occasion in front of 27,000 supporters.
It knocked the stuffing out of a promising start to the season for newly-promoted Liverpool, who stunned Chelsea on the opening day just one week before the derby - but then had to wait until early December for their next league win.
Now, with their season back on track after a mini-post-Christmas revival, here is the opportunity to make amends. Liverpool will play in front of another bumper crowd at Goodison Park on Friday night, live on Sky Sports, but will they feel the pressure this time? Beard thinks their opponents are the ones who are under the most scrutiny.
"It's going to be a bit of a role reversal of what happened at Anfield," he tells Sky Sports. "So hopefully on the night we can put Everton under a little bit more pressure and make them experience what we experienced at the start of the season.
"We don't play at Anfield week in, week out. Everton don't play at Goodison week in, week out. So it will be exactly the same [feeling as we had at Anfield in September] for Everton on Friday night. This game puts them under pressure to perform because of the size of the occasion and it being at Goodison."
Friday's Merseyside derby is the opening act in a bumper list of fixtures on Women's Football Weekend. Manchester United, Aston Villa and Reading are hosting matches in their men's team's stadiums, while there is also a north London derby and a clash of the titans involving Manchester City and Chelsea on the agenda.
Women's Football Weekend also offers analysts of the growth of the game to reflect on its progression - with this year especially important given it is the first since the successful European Championships in England.
Beard feels that weekends like these will help. "The ceiling can be what it wants to be if we are getting 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 at these games and then selling out Wembley in the Euros," he said.
"You're seeing more fans through the doors. Most teams' average attendances have grown. That's the success of the Euros, everyone has seen a knock-on effect of that.
"This weekend is an opportunity for people to come to games who have never really been before. There are a lot of people who come to games and like the product, what they see, the honesty from the players."
That "accessibility", as the Liverpool manager calls it, is more than just promoting a brand. There is a human side to it as well.
"We had a lovely email this week from a fan thanking the players for the contact that we've allowed with their daughter and it's helped her in school.
"For me, that's a fantastic story: we're giving young girls - and young boys as well - confidence to fulfil their dreams."
The growth of the women's game and the growth of Liverpool in the WSL can be paired together - especially given Beard uses the phrase "we can't run until we can walk" to describe both pathways in his conversation with Sky Sports.
The Liverpool manager has opened up about the three-to-five-year plan his side are in the middle of - which started when he took over the Merseyside club as a second-tier team in 2021 and will end when they are challenging for trophies and Europe at the top.
"From our end, we want to be playing Champions League football and competing at the top end of the table," he says about the end result. "The men's Premier League - it's tough to win it so I think it will be the same process. The end will be competing to win trophies.
"We're well on schedule for that - if not ahead of schedule.
"The first part of it was getting promoted, the second part is consolidating ourselves in the Super League and then the next stage is to start to challenge."
Liverpool are two years into their plan and are starting to break away from the bottom end of the table and looking up. As Beard states, they are on course for what he sees in his vision.
"Apart from when we won the league in 2013, it's taken teams three years at least to get into those top positions," he says. "It took Emma Hayes three years to win the league at Chelsea, it took Nick Cushing three years to win the league with Manchester City. And it's taken Manchester United three years to try and break into that top three.
"So it's not going to happen overnight - the game has progressed too much. When I was here in 2012, we made 13 changes and then we won the league next year. That's not possible now. You're seeing big transfer fees, multi-year contracts where there's more stability. It's much tougher to break into that top three or four now."
And then comes that phrase again: "We won't run before we can walk."
Watch Everton vs Liverpool in the Merseyside derby live on Sky Sports Football this Friday night as part of Women's Football Weekend from 7pm; kick-off 7.30pm
