Press conferenceMatt Beard on Van de Sanden return, midweek win and Man City trip

The Reds face City in the Barclays Women’s Super League, with kick-off at the Academy Stadium in Manchester set for 2pm GMT.

Beard sat down with the media to discuss a range of topics ahead of the fixture.

Read a summary below.

What do you make of City and how tough a game is this going to be away from home?

They are a fantastic team. I feel it’s going to take them a little bit of time, especially with the turnover that they have had, the players they have lost. Each week their performance level gets better so it’s going to be a tough afternoon for us. We played them in pre-season and it was a good game and we learned a lot from it, so we can take some positives from that performance.

If we look at the way that our season has gone so far there are loads of positives we can take, but we just need to start turning the positivity into consistency and into points. Gareth [Taylor] has done a good job since he’s been there and it was always going to be tough taking over from Nick Cushing. But it’s a north-west derby and we are looking forward to the game.

What can you take into this game from your excellent result in midweek against Leicester City Women in the Continental League Cup?

It was a good team performance. We looked at a different shape as well, as we have been switching to 3-5-2 in a lot of the games with the injuries to the front line we’ve got. I was pleased. I was pleased to get the goals from open play, pleased with scoring from a corner as well because last season we were really dangerous from set-plays. There were lots of positives to take. I felt we pressed Leicester well, we bypassed their press at times really well, so from our perspective there were some valuable lessons learned and another way of playing, which gives me a little bit of tactical flexibility with the group.

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How is your squad looking injury-wise?

Everyone is fine. Shanice van de Sanden will be in full training today so hopefully she will be available for some minutes at the weekend, which would be a great lift for the team.

How good is it to have Shanice back and what difference can she make for the team?

Everyone is aware of her pace. If I look back at the Arsenal game when they were getting a bit deep and the gaps started to appear a little bit more - because they have had such a busy schedule over the last three weeks - to have someone like Shanice coming off the bench with her pace and how direct she can be, she definitely will cause teams problems. To have her back available in the matchday squad, and it’s not guaranteed that will happen, but we are pleased with her progress and as long as there’s no reaction to training today then fingers crossed she should be available for selection on Sunday. If not, then we are probably looking at Aston Villa the week after.

How important is it to make sure you start well away from home against a top side?

It’s important. We can’t let teams like Arsenal and Manchester City settle into a rhythm. We want to be on the front foot but at the same time it’s a 90-minute game, and I think the way we’ve finished a lot of our games this season, we have finished very strongly. If you go back to the Chelsea performance as an example, even the second half against Tottenham. We were pleased with our performance against Arsenal but desperately disappointed that we never got anything out of the game. But when you play the top teams and you have that lapse then sometimes you get punished and that happened to us against Arsenal.

We are pleased with how we are performing, we just need to find that consistency level. It’s a tough, tough league, and if you look at the balance of fixtures from the start once we get this game at Manchester City out of the way, we will have played four teams that finished in the top five last season. We can take a lot of confidence from positive moments in the games and the problems that we caused these top teams. I’m confident as time goes we will get better and we will get more belief, and I’m confident we will have a good season.

I say it time and time again, this is a tough league. We’ve been out of it for two years and it’s not going to be all plain sailing. We are going to have highs and we are going to have lows, but the most important thing is we stick together. If you look at the Arsenal performance, when we went 2-0 down we could have quite easily gone into our shell but we didn’t. We kept playing, we kept putting them under pressure and kept creating chances. On another day we could have converted one or two of them.

You made plenty of changes in midweek but that must give you confidence that once you get this really tough run of games out of the way, you might have a better chance of picking up points?

Listen, there’s no easy games in this division. We won’t take anything for granted. What we will do is take the learnings that we’ve had in certain moments against these top sides to make sure we don’t allow it to happen against some of the teams that maybe we will be in and around, whether that’s now [or at the] end of the season, but what we have to do is remain positive. I said this after we played Chelsea, that we can’t get carried away. We just need to concentrate on ourselves and do as much as we can to put ourselves in a good position come the Christmas break.