Richard Wood is hoping Swindon Town Women’s keep learning their lessons from last year after making a fast start to the new season.

Town have made a spectacular start to the new season, sitting joint top of the table with four wins from four and have had back-to-back crowds above 500 at the Nigel Eady County Ground, the last of which witnessed a 9-0 win over Southampton Women.

After a great season last year but falling short of the top two, Wood is hoping to have learned from that experience and keep pushing Swindon forward.

 

 

He said: “It is nice to get off to a good start because it means morale is high and we have good buy-in from the players.

“We are not getting carried away with ourselves because we know in this division if you want to get promoted then you have to be faultless.

“The frustrating thing for a manager at this level is that you are constantly learning lessons the hard way and it is a 12-month-cycle to be able to put many of those things right.

“It is good to have good experiences but you need to have things go a bit wrong for you to learn and put measures in place to improve, for me, this year was about making sure our foundations are really strong.

“Nobody can say for sure ‘We are getting promoted this year’ but you can build to the point where that becomes inevitable.

“I have a saying ‘Don’t let best get in the way of better’, so if what we can do is better then we do that and eventually you will get to best; we are always looking to improve.”

Swindon are back at the Nigel Eady County Ground this weekend against Maidenhead and that game is one of the lessons Wood hopes to learn from last year.

He said: “Giving the fans something to enjoy again would be the plan but I have got a lot of respect for Maidenhead.

“I think Ed [Jackson-Norris], their manager, is great, he is a really good coach and a nice guy too.

“They need to be respected because they gave us a bloody nose last year when we were 2-0 up at halftime and lost 3-2.

“A bit like the Bridgewater game, this is one on my calendar that I want to put right.

“Bridgewater and Maidenhead were games where I felt we should have won but we didn’t and wanting to improve, these are the check-off games.”