And on the pitch results have certainly been positive since Beard’s re-appointment, with the team currently on an 18-match unbeaten run in the league since their only defeat of the campaign so far, which came on the opening weekend. So how have they done it?
“Everything started with the recruitment in the summer. [Previously] I felt the team had very similar personnel, they could only play one way – that was something we wanted to address. We recruited good players, good people, and it really has driven competition for places,” Beard said. “Every single staff member and player has worked incredibly hard. Going 18 league games unbeaten is tough for anyone to do. But the job’s not done, we’ve got to keep our feet on the ground. It’s within touching distance but until it’s mathematically done then we’re still in a race.”
Despite Beard’s caution, the Merseyside club’s return to the WSL now seems a matter of ‘when’, not ‘if’, as they have an 11-point lead at the top of the Championship with four games left for their nearest rivals, and they look all but guaranteed to tick off ‘target one’ on that five-year plan, but once they’re up, he is urging calm when it comes to their expectations next term.
“We had two years to get out of the Championship and hopefully we can do that in year one. Beyond that, we’ve got to be sensible. You look at Leicester who went up, at Aston Villa who went up, and they’ve struggled, and you look at Everton and they’ve struggled this year as well, so it’s not easy to just say ‘because we’re Liverpool, we’re going to go in and we’re going to do this and this’. We know it’s probably the toughest division in the world when it comes down to competitiveness.
“The ambition is to get up, to stay in the division, to consolidate and then we want to be challenging. That’s the long-term ambition and it’s not going to happen overnight.”
Sunday’s hosts are another of Beard’s former clubs, second-placed Bristol City, whom he took charge of on an interim basis for the latter half of last season to provide maternity cover for Tanya Oxtoby. They are poised to set a new record for a Women’s Championship crowd, with more than 5,000 tickets having been sold for the game at Ashton Gate.
It was after his spell in the West Country that Beard got the call to move back to Merseyside and it didn’t take long to decide. “It’s always a risk going back somewhere, especially after what we achieved in my first time here, but when I spoke with the club the ambition was clear, and my family loved the north west, so while there was other discussions with other clubs but there was only one club I wanted to go to, and that was Liverpool.” It seems increasingly like a reunion that has awoken a sleeping giant of the women’s game.
