Manchester City seek to salvage season with Champions League place

When Manchester City announced that their women’s team would be embarking on a ground-breaking tour of the United States this summer a glorious treble remained within the grasp of Nick Cushing’s side.

It was April and optimism at the Etihad Campus, where Cushing’s players share many facilities with Pep Guardiola’s Premier League champions, was high. Then the setbacks began. First, City lost an FA Cup semi-final to Emma Hayes’s Chelsea and then Lyon knocked them out at the same stage of the Champions League, before Hayes’s team clinched the Women’s Super League title.

Now one final, potentially crushing, disappointment must be avoided. With a renascent Arsenal only one point behind City going into Sunday afternoon’s final round of WSL fixtures, they dare not stumble at home to Everton. A slip could permit Joe Montemurro’s players, who travel to Bristol City, to leapfrog into second place and snatch the division’s last Champions League slot.

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In March Arsenal beat Cushing’s side in the Continental Cup final, ensuring there would be no repeat of the domestic double secured in 2016, the last full campaign before the game’s switch from a summer to a winter schedule.

“It’s been a disappointing season,” concedes City’s England forward Nikita Parris. “But we’re still so close to qualifying for the Champions League. We’ve got a lot of young, developing players so we’re in a good place. Qualifying is massive. We’re determined to do it. It’s what this club needs.”

A team apparently running on empty also look in need of a good rest before they face Paris Saint-Germain, North Carolina Courage and Chelsea at the inaugural International Champions Cup in Miami in late July. A training camp in Oregon follows but, for several of Cushing’s players, the American trip comes tightly sandwiched between World Cup qualifiers with England involving away dates in Russia in June and Wales in August.

The presence of so many key components of Phil Neville’s squad in their ranks is both a blessing and a curse for City. Tellingly 10 of the starting XI Cushing deployed for the goalless Champions League semi-final first leg against Lyon had been called up by Neville this year, with the Lionesses’ participation in March’s SheBelieves Cup in the United States proving exhausting.

For a time before Neville’s appointment City feared losing Cushing to England but the 33-year-old eventually withdrew from the FA’s shortlist, signing a new club contract. Off-pitch turmoil was averted but on it the absence of City’s captain, the centre-half Steph Houghton, with an ankle injury contributed to some vital points being dropped during February.

By then the departures last summer of the outstanding England right-back Lucy Bronze to Lyon and the forward Toni Duggan to Barcelona were really being felt. Perhaps inevitably an expertly volleyed goal from Bronze gave Lyon a 1-0 aggregate Champions League win against her old club – the French champions face Wolfsburg in Kiev on Thursday.

With City’s new Denmark striker Nadia Nadim struggling, Chelsea have proved the infinitely better-balanced unit. Significantly, the shortlist for the PFA female player of the year comprised five Chelsea stars and City’s Jill Scott. The award was deservedly won by Fran Kirby; the Chelsea forward blessed with a rare ability to play between the lines has barely stopped scoring this season.

Hayes, who gave birth to a healthy baby boy on Thursday when Chelsea announced that the other twin she was expecting had sadly “failed to make it”, is undoubtedly an exceptional coach but Kirby’s catalytic presence remains the overwhelming reason for the six-point gap separating the top two.

This gulf will not have gone down well with City’s Abu Dhabi-based ownership. Ditto the disappointing average attendances of around 1,500 at the women’s 7,000-capacity Academy Stadium. But next season offers a prospective new dawn and, in Keira Walsh, Mel Lawley and Georgia Stanway, Cushing has three of England’s brightest emerging talents.

In 12 months that trio could well be preparing for the 2019 World Cup in France having helped City reclaim the game’s glittering prizes. First though a Champions League place needs guaranteeing.