Nick Cushing says his Manchester City Women's side should have won the domestic treble after securing FA Cup

The Manchester City Women manager Nick Cushing has said his side “should have won the league” as well as the League Cup and the FA Cup. 

A crowd of 43,264 watched City win the FA Cup for a second time at Wembley on Saturday as second-half goals from Keira Walsh, Georgia Stanway and 18-year-old Lauren Hemp demolished Women’s Super League debutants West Ham. 

City will finish the season unbeaten domestically, should they avoid defeat in their final game of the season against Arsenal. The league champions Arsenal have lost twice this season but City’s five draws compared to Arsenal’s zero means they are currently four points behind the Gunners ahead of the final game of the season.

City have drawn both games against Chelsea and Bristol City and their home game against Reading. A 2-0 defeat to Atletico Madrid in September, which saw City exit the Women’s Champions League, is the only game Cushing’s side have lost all season.

“I’m a realist - I understand football,” Cushing said. “Last season, we didn’t win anything and there are reasons for that. We had to be logical. We had to look in the off-season at why, physically, we weren’t great at the end of last season, why we thought the mindset of the group wasn’t resilient enough and why we didn’t absorb pressure enough.

“We changed a few things in the off-season - one or two members of staff, one or two things with the operation, brought some new players in - and potentially now we can go undefeated. The flip side of that is we should have won the league. We feel Arsenal deserve the league but we don’t feel they were better than us.

“We haven’t lost a game, we should have won the games against Reading when we were 1–0 up, Bristol when we were 1–0 up and Chelsea when we were 2–0 up.

“I can go through all of these things but we have to look at the logical reasoning, look at how we make sure we don’t draw those games next year while retaining all the good things we have this year.

“We just reflect on draws. I’m not a genius, but I said in 2016 that the league would be won on heads to heads. I said this season that the league would be won on the teams that drop points in and around the heads to heads, and it’s been proven. 

“I thought against Chelsea, against Arsenal, we could go and win, but we had to make sure that we were consistent enough across those games, and we haven’t been consistent enough. No one always wins.”

After finishing last season empty-handed, the Champions League remains the only club competition City have not won since Cushing tool charge of the club in 2013. He viewed their exit from that competition at the earliest stage this season as “probably the tail end of what happened last season - we hadn’t got over that” before adding he was reluctant to make winning the Champions League his team’s priority next season. 

“I think it’s dangerous to make the Champions League your top aspiration because there are so many difficult teams in it,” he said. “Not only are there so many difficult teams in it - you see every year, because of the format of the Champions League, that you don’t really know who you’ve got. You can get the best team, you can get the best unseeded team, and then it’s a really tight game. 

“I think you’ve got to just go into Champions League and relish the fact that you’re putting yourself up against the best teams in Europe. If you’re good enough, you’ll get through to the latter stages. Chelsea got through to the latter stages and I thought in the Champions League this year, they were excellent. We’ve all seen the way they pushed Lyon hard. 

“Our goal was always to be domestically dominant, to be up there, to try and make it a seventh season where come April we’re competing for everything. With Champions League, we’ll embrace the fact we’re coming up against Europe’s elite, and hope that we can do what we’ve done in 2016 and 2017: try and get into those latter stages where you’re really with the big teams and the best teams go on and win.”