Burton Albion Ladies return to league weekend as they travel to Wales to face The New Saints in FA Women’s National League Division 1 action.
TNS currently sit fifth in the division having defeated Solihull Moors 5-1 in the league last time out.
The Brewers face the long journey to Wales to face Sunday’s opponents and manager James Billings believes the players have enough experience to cope with the journey.
“Travelling together on a bus brings the team together a little more,” he said.
“Obviously travelling on a bus you’re going to be sat in a certain position for a long time which can be quite draining. For most of the girls this isn’t the longest journey they have ever done so I think there is a few of them there with an enough experience to help the team through.”
This weekend will also mark Billings first game in charge of the side and he hopes to get off to the best possible start.
He said; “we’ve got to stick to what we’ve been doing in training,”
“We want to play football but then we don’t want to overcomplicate things to much. We’ve start to show the little bits that we’ve been putting into training over my first few games in charge. Against Leicester United we’d only had them a few weeks but they were already showing signs of things that we as coaching staff wanted to see.
“Against West Brom, they took everything on board that we had planned but we’re trying to make them a little bit more defensively solid. We have shown the last few games that we can score goals when we want too but my concern at the minute is with the goals that with the goals we have conceded and the amount that we have conceded, we need to try and tighten that up first.”
The Brewers have just come off a back to back in which goalkeeper Lily Doocey was making her first appearances of the season.
“It’s definitely exciting for me because it was my first game, the week before last [against Lye],” she said.
“These have been my firs games back in like three years so yeah to win two games in a row is pretty good. We just need to keep the confidence now for the league games because we start to pick up victories if we play the same way.”
Midfielder Amy Johnson feels the team know the game is going to be tough but the team are in high spirits.
“We just need to prepare well, because obviously it’s going to be a tough game,” she said.
“We’re in high spirits anyway, so if we keep the positivity, we can do it. We’ll just go out there focused, ready and committed then we can do I feel we have every chance of getting a result.
“Last week, we made it hard for ourselves early on but then we found our feet and got into our strengths. We did a lot of passing and when we had it on the floor, we managed to get around them instead of trying to kick it just over [the top]. It really managed to work with the players and make easy goals for us.”
The Brewers have no fresh injury concerns heading into the game, with a number of players close to making a return to action.