The men’s team didn’t play on Saturday, but it was far from a relaxing weekend off! Instead, we saw the women’s team continue an incredibly galling start of the season.

Our performances have been better than our results, and while you can draw some succour from that, it’s a dangerous habit which needs to be broken before we got drawn into a scrap at the bottom end of the table.

The loss to Barry Town United didn’t break that sequence: quite the opposite. Instead, it was the most frustrating game of all so far this season, and that’s saying something!

We had the vast majority of the play, but simply couldn’t turn chances into goals. Credit to The Linnets, as they were impressively organised and defended superbly. This was not a case of parking the bus and hoping for the best. Instead, Barry replicated the tactic they executed well when they earned a creditable draw at Swansea earlier in the season.

They defended stoutly while looking to break swiftly, with swift strikers breaking forwards onto the service of an astute Number 10 who knew how to pick a pass.

In the first half they didn’t get those attempts to break away right, and as a consequence we completely dominated them with little threat to our goal.

They improved on the break in the second half, and carved out a couple of excellent chances which Wrexham keeper Lizzie Craven did brilliantly to repel. One save she made in the first minute after the break was simply breath-taking.

However we maintained our stranglehold on possession and continued to carve out opportunities to score. Sadly, the ball just wouldn’t go into the back of the net for us.

Ironically, we would have 3 goalmouth scrambles from well-delivered Lili Jones corners which we simply couldn’t force into the net.

(If you don’t watch the women’s games, by the way, I promise you that Lili is as great with the ball as she is on “Welcome to Wrexham”. And while we’re on the subject, why on earth aren’t you glued to the women’s games? They’re free to watch after all!)

The last of those scrambles was a remarkable affair, as the ball remained in the six yard box for what seemed to be in eternity. First Nat Clark had a short cleared off the line, then Keren Allen’s follow-up took a deflection before being blocked on the line, the ball coming to rest temptingly close to the goal line, but Barry’s goalkeeper managed to smother it before Liv Fuller could tap it into the empty net.

Why is that ironic? Because a couple of minutes later, Barry delivered a similar corner and Carra Jones’ clearance off the line struck an attacking player on the back of the head as she twisted to try and avoid it hitting her and spiralled into the top corner.

That unfortunate goal came at the end of a disastrous couple of minutes for us which turned the game. Erin Lovett had just come on as a substitute, but was sent off after her first involvement in the game.

The free kick was brilliantly saved by Craven but the resulting corner led to that peculiar, decisive goal.

We tried to fight back with ten players, and Rosie Hughes nearly scored a bizarre goal with the last kick of the match, half volleying a drop ball in the D wide of the left post. It simply was not to be.

Frustration piled on frustration. The circumstances around this galling match added to the bitterness of defeat.

This wasn’t the first time we’ve played well and lost this season, in fact it was the third time in five games!

It feels particularly odd to reflect on the start of our season, as we’ve been putting in admirable performances but find ourselves well adrift of where we wish to be.

Home defeats to Cardiff and Swansea are perhaps not much to worry about, especially as we were the better side against Cardiff, and had excellent spells against Swansea. We could easily have won those matches.

The only poor performance we’ve put in this season was at Briton ferry, who showed what they can do this weekend with an admirable draw at Cardiff.

That’s the other element of frustration which comes from Sunday’s match. On a remarkable day, the big two suffered.

Cardiff dropping home points to Briton Ferry was a surprise in terms of the stature of the two teams, if not their form. Indeed at the break City were trailing 2-0.

Furthermore, Swansea we’re losing at half time, and the table toppers did not fashion a comeback. By the end of the match, they had been thrashed 5-l by TNS. A remarkable sequence of results left the door open for us to claw back ground on the big two, but as the dust settled at the end of the day there were two inescapable conclusions to draw. One was that we’d failed to haul ourselves back into title contention, and the other is that the big two perhaps aren’t as big as we thought!

How annoying that, when the domination of the big two appears to be broken, we’ve not been able to put ourselves into a position where we can challenge them.

Yet, as I said before, you can’t really point the finger at a downturn in performances. Against both Cardiff and Swansea we came as close as we ever have to beating them, and in terms of quality of passing and coherence the Barry performance was our best of the season. It’s just not dropping for us at the moment, and we seem to have been blunted going forwards. Our approach play is good, defensively we’ve looked solid and key injured players like Allen and Phoebe Davies (below) have returned after injury. However, we are not scoring goals at the frequency we’d like to. Five games, five goals. We need to improve that.

Don’t write us off. This team has spirit aplenty and hopefully this is the point where our season can really get going. We have a cup tie coming up this weekend against a lower division team which we would hope to build some confidence against.

 Then we have a run of fixtures which look a little kinder, a fascinating derby against TNS notwithstanding. We can build from here, and our performances suggest we’re in a false league position.

 However, we have to accept that, with the points not stacking up, our immediate target is getting into the top half of the table when the league splits in February rather than tilting at the vulnerable big two.