‘Ruby’s a good player… she's very busy'

Ruby Grant marked her SSE Women’s FA Cup debut with a hat-trick on Sunday as we ran out 4-0 winners over Crawley Wasps.

The 16-year-old delivered a player-of-the-match performance in only her second start of the season, guaranteeing our place in the fifth round.

We spoke to Joe Montemurro after the final whistle - and this is what he said:

on returning to the touchline after illness…

I’m 95 per cent there. I hate staying away from work, so it was pretty much forced upon me by everyone to get away from the training ground! It’s one of those situations where you’ve got to be careful as we don’t want to needlessly lose any other players.

on the performance…

We played some great football. It was the perfect result and we were able to rest some key players too. We played a lot of the younger players and they did a fantastic job, and we were able to get the minutes that we needed to the main players. Keeping back-to-back clean sheets is also very encouraging. We’re always looking to play our attacking football, but we need control and security at the back too. That needs to be a habit.

on the condition of his squad…

We’re back in control in terms of when we can bring players back in, and at least now we know dates in terms of their rehab and so on. It was very difficult before Christmas when we were trying to get players back in and we were losing players at will, so it was incredibly tough to get control of the process of rehabilitation and how we were going to do it in terms of games. We’re back in control now and that’s the most important thing. We know who can play, when we can play them and how many minutes we should give them, so now we can get them all physically ready for the run home, which is really important for us.

on 16-year-old Grant scoring a hat-trick…

She’s a good little player. She’s very busy around the middle and wide areas and she got into some very dangerous positions. The service for her was very good and I think it’s safe to say that we were in control from the start. It was a good outing for us with regards to our planning and making sure that we came through unscathed.