Everton Women 1-3 Manchester City Women: Stanway brace seals FA Cup final win

There was a defeatist response to the petition a young Everton supporter raised to get Carlo Ancelotti’s team’s game at Newcastle rescheduled, giving the club’s women’s side FA Cup Final optimum spotlight. The near 3,000 votes would have been vastly more if someone had taken up the cause.

More fool the authorities and their small minds. Everton lost in the final reckoning – unstitched in extra time by a Manchester City side whose technically superiority was most evident in the Rolls Royce presence of Sam Mewis. But it was a game which crackled into life, demonstrating to any who might doubt it the quality, physicality and tactical depth of the women’s game.

The foreign contingent like Mewis and Everton’s Australian Valerie Gauvin, are raising the standard everywhere. But this game was about the stellar contribution of Sandy McIver, whose clutch of saves kept Everton alive for so long; Caroline Weir, who hit the post twice as City looked to batter the door down late in normal time; and 19 year-old Jess Park who injected energy into City from the bench late on.

It was Park who finally unlocked things, threading an intelligent ball for 21-year-old Georgia Stanway whose dexterity and anticipation saw her clip through McIver’s legs and off the post to win the game in the 11th minute of extra time. But in a contest resembling some of the titanic battles between the men’s side early in the club’s Abu Dhabi era, Everton possessed an extraordinary resilience. Their intensity looked capable of taking the trophy until deep into the game.

They were initially reticent, engaged in the same struggle for self-belief we had seen against Chelsea in the quarter final. Mewis’ opening goal – ghosting away from her marker Damaris Egurrola and rising to deliver a powerful header from Chloe Kelly’s corner – was the least City deserved.

It helped Everton’s cause that the finishing of Kelly, who began this tournament for Everton in depths of last winter, was fractionally off. She flashed a golden opportunity over the bar on the half volley during the thrilling denouement. There is also a consistent pattern of difficulty in locating Ellen White, who had minimal service before departing on the half hour.

But McIver, who was briefly on City’s books and has never really looked in the running to displace Ellie Roebuck in Phil Neville’s mind, provided a huge contribution. She plays in the raw, slapping the ball away if she has too, and her intuitive style is effective. She clawed away a point blank shot from Kelly, her former flat-mate, repelled another Kelly effort at the near and tipped a Steph Houghton header onto the post.

The defensive contributions of Danielle Turner and Izzy Christiansen, in front of defence, will also live long in the mind, though Everton had ambition, too.

There was an element of luck about their equaliser – Gauvin was facing away from goal when she leapt, challenged, to head in Izzy Christiansen’s corner on the hour – but that galvanised them. Another big opportunity fell to Gauvin, who headed Nicoline Sorensen’s cross wide, though Sorensen also brought a big save from Roebuck, on a day which deconstructed all the all old preconceptions about goalkeeping in the women’s game.

Mewis, driving through midfield, was integral to City maintaining an intensity which Stanway and Park picked up when they arrived in the second half. The presence of two such young talents on the City bench said everything about the depth of City’s talent and the hopes for England, who have been set the target of winning a trophy by 2023. It was Stanway who played in substitute Janine Beckie for City’s third in the last move of the match.

Though he admitted City had deserved the win, disappointment was etched across manager Willie Kirk’s face last night. His side’s performance reveals what flows from a club being wholly committed to its women’s team, whose use of the Finch Farm training base throws the Liverpool’s side’s use of a Wirral facility attitude into contrast. Chairman Bill Kenwright was at Wembley, not St James’ Park.

‘The manner of the defeat can only heighten your trust and reinforce tour belief that this can be a launch pad to success,’ Kirk said. ‘I really believe that.’