Andy Butler felt things just didn’t fall for his side during Sunday’s defeat at home to Birmingham and West Midlands.
The visitors scored twice in the second half to take three points away from Oxford Street in the FAWNL Division One Midlands, but Butler says he can also take a lot from having played well against the league’s top two sides on consecutive weekends.
“We’ve just played the top two in the league back-to-back, and whilst we haven’t got the results we wanted, I still feel like we worked well in parts, we’ve just had a couple of little things just not go our way,” he said.
“We had a couple bits where if they go our way it’s another story on a different day, we want to move on now and focus on the rest of the games ahead, we want to start racking up those points on the board again.
“We believe that if we have a good end to the season and then carry that on into pre-season, there’s no reason why we can’t be up where teams like they are, we want to challenge next season.”
The Belles now have just six games left of their first season in the fourth tier, and Butler is keen to use their experiences this campaign to finish strongly and drive the standards on into next season.
“We’ll go back in and get ready again for what’s to come, we’ve played those top two teams and that’ll show us where we want to be, those are the standards that have been set and we want to be better,” he added.
“As long as we keep that belief, the intensity, the work rate high, we’ll get there, we just have to get that consistency right in our games, we have some good players here and we can build on this.
“We have a few games left to go and we want to make sure we finish it with some more good results, it’ll be important to get those results against teams around us and be secure, and I have the confidence in the players to do just that.”