Taking place at Ringwood Town, the Cherries played out a 2-2 draw, with Hannah Bennett and Rosie Eden getting on the scoresheet. 

Cuss touched upon the following topics in his post-match interview... 

On the performance…

I was really pleased. I think it was a good challenge against a team who are higher up than us in the women’s football pyramid.

It challenged us defensively and when we had the ball too. I was pleased with large parts of the game but obviously we’re disappointed not to see out the win. It was a good workout and it’s just the second game of pre-season, so overall I’m really pleased.

On pre-season…

We’ve looked at our pre-season programme, so it’s a challenge and that’s what today was, a good challenge. It’s a good opportunity to play players, give them minutes and build them up to that first game of the season.

We’re only a month into it and we’ve been trying to play and implement our style. We want to play out and be creative in the final third, and I’m pleased we were able to try that against better opposition yesterday.  

We didn’t resort to just going long, we tried to play short and combine well, so I’m really pleased with that.

On upcoming fixtures…

We’re going up to Chelsea to play their academy side this week and it’ll be another really good test for us.  

We’ve got two good mid-week games now, one this week and one next week against Yeovil. So in those two games, we’ll look to get more minutes into the players and get them ready for the start of the season.