Everton Women fall to 5th place after loss to Manchester United

Everton currently has two Scotsmen as head coaches who oversaw 3-1 scorelines this weekend, but unfortunately Everton Women were on the losing side against Manchester United.

Manager Willile Kirk’s former team has proven to be quite a thorn in his side, and he has yet to win against the Red Devils since moving to Everton.

The result meant that Everton went down to fifth place while Manchester United went up to fourth on goal differential with both sides tied on 15 points.

Kirk was doubly disappointed as the Blues went up 1-0 early after Simone Magill‘s header off of a corner from Inessa Kaagman. It’s going in the books as an own goal because the United keeper got a hand to it before it went into the net.

However the Red Devils quickly made it 1-1 when Lauren James scored from close range. The second goal came after Katie Zelem converted a penalty when James was brought down in the box. James then made it 3-1 to close out the first half when she scored from distance.

Kirk told WSL.com that he had hoped for more after the positive start of the game:

“The result was frustrating because we spoke all week about taking the lead to test United’s resilience and mentality and after doing so, our game management was poor. I felt if we’d kept that for 10-15 minutes that would’ve given us in really good chance to go on and win the game because we started exactly as we wanted.”

Lineup:

Everton (4-2-3-1): Tinja-Riikka Korpela; Esme Morgan, Megan Finnigan, Gabby George, Danielle Turner; Maéva Clemaron, Lucy Graham; Chloe Kelly, Molly Pike, Inessa Kaagman; Simone Magill

Substitutes: Hannah Cain for Pike 63, Chantelle Boye-Hlorkah for Kaagman 63, Abbey-Leigh Stringer for Graham 74

Next up:
Everton faces first place Arsenal on Sunday, which strikes fear in our hearts because they recently embarrassed Bristol City to the tune of a 11-1 win. Gunners’ forward Vivianne Miedema is the top goalscorer of the WSL with 12 goals from 9 matches.

Photo by Ash Donelon/Manchester United via Getty Images