McNamara ambitious as Wolves secure Promotion to WSL2
Wolverhampton Wanderers Women head coach Dan McNamara spoke to the media ahead of his side’s FA Women’s National League Tier 3 play-off match against their Southern Division counterparts Plymouth Argyle at the Pirelli Stadium on Monday.
After securing second place in the Women's National League Premier Division table, Wolves earned promotion to the Barclays Women’s Super League 2, as the Old Gold secured professional status for the first time in the club’s history.
You talked about how this is going to be a life-changing moment on Monday, potentially. How excited are you by the game?
“I’m really looking forward to it. As I said, missing out last time really hurt. It's a showcase game, they’re the games you want to be part of and I never got to be part of something so big as a player and to do it as a manager is really exciting. And watching the group train this week and watching how they have applied themselves, it really raises that excitement within the staff.
But we try to remain grounded, and we got to make sure we put on a performance that we all can be proud of on Monday.”
Your team and Plymouth have got the respective best defences in your two divisions. Do you think this is going to be a tight game that might be separated by one moment?
“It could be, and might not be the moment that we’ll think it will, with the goal, it could be a moment of a block. It could be a goalkeeper save, a big tackle. There’s a whole host of moments that could make up Monday.
But what we can prove is that we’re hard to break down and we’ve both proved that we got a lot of attacking threat and quality going forward so it all bodes well for a fantastic game and hopefully we can be on the right end of one of them moments.”
Impact of Fan Support
McNamara also discussed the importance of club and fan support and rallying behind the team:
“Absolutely. They’ve been brilliant this season. I often talk about my first game all those years ago, about 43 people in the stands at Hensford, and you look at the crowd for our last home game, around 850. What a growth in the fanbase that is, we tipped well over a 1,000 at Telford, and we’ve seen what we’ve done at Molineux over the years.
Hopefully they didn’t have anything but did provide over the weekend, but as I said before, we 100% going to need them in some tough moments on Monday and hopefully the song list is ready and if they’re ready to really get behind the girls.”
What would it mean to you personally to finally see Wolves make it into the WSL?
“I try not to think about it because I don’t think I’ll put it into words. I think if we perform and do it on Monday, I think that’s something you might see, what it means to me afterwards, but I wouldn’t be doing it justice by putting it into words for you.
I now personally want to work at the top of the game; that ambition is a personal one. What we’ve seen over the last few months from the football club would suggest that ambition stretches further than me as an individual and us as a group, which we call Wolves Women.
So we will keep striving to be the best we can. Let’s get to the WSL2 first and try to understand the quality that’s going to take to maintain in the league if we were to get there, but it's small steps at the moment.”
A place in the WSL2 is there for the taking. What’s the team’s mentality and preparation going into the playoff?
“It’ll be the same as what seems like winning 20 out of 22 league games. We have an identity as a club, and we don’t plan on changing that identity going into Monday. We want to be intense with our work and actions, and look, I’m not somebody who is going to change the way that we play to play a bigger game.
We will go out and be Wolves and be the Wolves that I’ve seen so much success in, and hopefully that will be enough for more success on Monday.
It’ll be a tough afternoon, and one that might be decided by a moment of brilliance or bravery, but it’ll probably be our toughest game of the season because I know what Plymouth are like, are about, and I know what their manager stands for, so overall, it will be an exciting game.”
The team came close to promotion in the 2024/25 season. How did you turn that disappointment into preparation for this match?
“I don’t think it's disappointment to be honest. As I said earlier, you look at where we were this summer. If someone told me we would win 20 out of 22 league games, I would’ve probably laughed at them. But it’s all down to the group, the players, the leadership. We brought in players over the summer, and the group set the standards.
They understand what I expect as a manager, and they very quickly get the new players into line, and when you have a culture and environment that we have here, you always see people who want to give it their all, and we certainly have seen that, so hopefully we can see that on Monday.”
How have setbacks, such as losing the playoff final to Southampton in the past, helped you gain resilience for future matches?
“You think the game against Southampton was a long time ago, but there are still 5-7 of the girls that were there and experienced that. It’s one of those big moments in games that you want to get used to.
The girls will be nervous going into the game, of course, they will. These nerves are a good thing, I think it’s always a bit strange if you’re not nervous, but we’ve got to draw on those experiences, of the stadium, the atmosphere, playing in front of a huge crowd (I think about 2,000 tickets have been sold so far) so playing in front of a crowd is often a different experience.
But what Plymouth have gained is experience, they play at Home Park, they have a packed out stadium every week, so we need to try and get little margins of bringing those disappointments, those experiences, all together to try and achieve a positive outcome.
There will be a lot of challenges on the pitch. It will be tough, Plymouth have been dominant in their league, but we have also been dominant in our league as well, and other than a contentious decision, we might be in a total different place.
We got to look at ourselves, we got to take Wolves Women and the way we play and the things we do into Monday and not look to far into opposition.”
At Burton Albion’s Pirelli Stadium, Wolves secured promotion with a close 1-0 victory over Plymouth. In their 26 year history, this is perhaps their greatest achievement and a huge step in the right direction to being where they want to be on the map for women’s football.