Landore’s Natasha Smith, who writes for team sponsor and unofficial Swansea City fanzine, ‘A Touch Far Vetched’, tells us about their West Wales League championship.
Landore Ladies was established in 2012, entering into the West Wales Women’s League for the 2012/13 season. As any football team starting out, we were targeting a steady introduction to the League and wanting to finish at a respectable position and hopefully with a good cup run – we succeeded with both.
Since then we have gone from strength to strength with minimal changes to the overall squad.
As always, we started the 2014/15 season with high expectations especially having missed out on winning the League title last season on goal-difference. The team used the disappointment to spur us on to success this season.
Landore’s first match was in the new Charity Shield called ‘The Spirit of Football Shield’, where the League Winners (Briton Ferry Llansawel) played us, the League Cup Winners. We went on to win 8-0, starting the season how we wanted!
Our overall aim for the season was to win the treble – League, League Cup and The Spirit of Football Shield.
There are a few competent teams in the West Wales League that we were expecting to challenge us, based on their performances in the previous season. One of those teams was Briton Ferry Llansawel, while Pontardawe, Dafen and Camrose always play a good game against us.
We have had a fantastic season but one of the best features has to be scoring the amount of goals that we have. We knew based on previous seasons that we had to be more clinical in front of goal to ensure we did not concede the title by goal-difference. Over the course of the season we managed to score 116 goals in the League alone and conceded just 12.
Another memorable experience for us was entering the Welsh Cup for the first time and progressing to the second round, where we were narrowly defeated by Cyncoed in extra-time, losing 3-2.
One of our other aims was to try and remain unbeaten in the League, no club had ever done that before and we thought it was a realistic target. All was going well until Sunday 15th March where we had to travel to Camrose. Unfortunately for us that weekend, a number of our players were away on holiday and we could only field 10 players for the game, resulting in us losing 3-1, having initially gone 1-0 up.
We had to make sure we got back to winning ways in the remaining games if we were to keep the League title in our sights.
On April 19th we played Dafen at home and knew if we won that game then we would need only one more win for the League to be ours. We beat Dafen 4-1 to set up an away game against Pontardawe, which could result in us becoming champions.
Unfortunately, Pontardawe fell foul of work commitments and were unable to field a team against us for this fixture, so we were awarded the three points, which gave us our first League title.
We would obviously have preferred to have won the points on the pitch but it was still a great feeling when we received the news, taking the title by thirteen points, winning seventeen and losing only one match.
Further to our League success, we also reached the League Cup Final for a third successive season but we narrowly lost 1-0 against Pontardawe, who were awarded a penalty in the first half.
Overall, we can only see this season as a success; we walked away with two trophies, which we are extremely proud of. The loss in the League Cup final has only made us even more hungry to complete the treble next season.
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