Bristol City head coach Lauren Smith on the newly promoted WSL side's summer: "The reason we've signed the players we have, and kept the players we have, is because they've got a bit between their teeth, a point to prove, a bit of resilience. What we want to see is a bit of ambition"
Tuesday 26 September 2023 13:54, UK
"People think that we’re the team to beat, going up and coming down – those are the things that’ve been said and we're going to do our best to prove them wrong," Lauren Smith, head coach of WSL new arrivals Bristol City, tells Sky Sports.
Bristol City are the first club promoted to the WSL since 2018 without an attachment to a men's Premier League side.
Though they will play in the lavish surroundings of the 27,000-seater Ashton Gate this season, budget constraints mean they are odds-on favourites to return to the Women's Championship at the first time of asking.
The Robins will have to be resourceful to upset the established order, although that's nothing new for Smith's time with the club.
When she returned to the West Country two years ago to take up her first senior managerial role after their relegation, she inherited a side with only six players on its books and three members of staff, including herself.
There were certainly easier jobs she could have picked, and it presented a daunting task - one she herself calls "terrifying". She was at least among familiar surroundings, having previously worked leading a number of age groups in the club's academy and as assistant head coach.
A club in transition also presented a pretty clear opportunity, if she could get it right. A blank slate, a chance to rebuild the club from the ground up, and without the usual morale drop a relegation brings with it.
That City are already back in the big time shows how quickly she has succeeded, and what a base she built in such a short timeframe.
So much so that seven of the team who started her first game in charge in 2021 could be on the team sheet when Leicester visit in their WSL return on October 1.
"There was one moment early on when we lost a couple of games and I thought, 'Oh God, don't get relegated again,'" she tells Sky Sports with a smile. "It was a rebuild of everything.
"Over that first summer I was adding to our list of players who would fit into the club every day and replacing others when they were signed by other clubs.
"I felt like I was getting nowhere for a while - but then we started getting bodies in the door and it picked up very quickly.
"Because it was my first role, I was really proud of being a head coach, and grateful. A bit scared, maybe let's call that terrified, but it did feel like a chance to try new things and do something different.
"We're seeing the positive effects of that now. Brooke Aspin and Naomi Layzell, two of many players we pulled from the academy and development teams, have now got two years of first-team football off the back of that.
"They're good enough, but that gave them the opportunity to show it. We've got a real good group of young players who haven't just been on the fringes, they've been right in the thick of it for two seasons."
Smith built a team with a point to prove, and achieved it in style by thrashing Charlton 4-0 in April to finally seal their promotion to the WSL.
She doesn't even remember the second half of that game, the memories of that empty squad list through to winning the title too overwhelming to cope.
But once the taste of success had sunk in, it was back to the whiteboard to recruit for this season - and another batch of hungry players, keen to show why bigger clubs had been wrong to let them out of their grasp.
"All of the signings we've made are about everybody wanting a real opportunity again," Smith says. "There's a door open here, who wants it the most? We've built a really positive squad off the back of that.
"The reason we've signed the players we have, and kept the players we have, is because they've got a bit between their teeth, a point to prove, a bit of resilience. What we want to see is a bit of ambition."
Keeping that mental strength will be doubly important this season. Last year, City won 15 of their 22 Championship games.
They could conceivably lose that many this season and still stay up, but if the Robins let defeats affect their morale, they will struggle. Smith uses last season's surprise survivors Leicester, who lost their first nine games before a stunning revival, as an example to follow.
She says: "Leicester did it really well last year after Christmas, they spun the whole thing on its head - they were already down, try to fight to get out of it. We can start that way as well.
"We do have targets in some aspects around our performance goals, the players have their own too which we don't share publicly. But for me, it's really important not just to focus on the win or the draw, if you look at how Leicester survived last year, the whole style of play changed, they had a bit of belief.
"You can't just look at the result at the end and get either bogged down or too high with it. That's how we take it on too."
Even looking beyond the scoreline, a narrow defeat to Manchester City in their opening friendly - after being smashed 14-1 by Gareth Taylor's side across two cup games last season - was cause for cautious optimism within the City hierarchy, who felt an additional level of respect from their big-spending opponents.
Certainly, where that respect is less felt, it will be used to galvinise the club. In the run-in to the title win, Smith and her staff took to updating a countdown on the dressing room wall of how many days were left - how long to make an impact, how long for her players to secure their dreams.
This time around, those print-outs could be replaced by a few of those dissenting voices. Because if there's one thing Smith knows how to do, it's prove people wrong.
