Chatham Town Women face another tough test on Sunday when they travel to face pre-season divisional favourites Norwich City Women after hitting the table top again last weekend with skipper Grace Coombs hoping for the three more points.

Coombs knows that her side face another real examination of their title credentials as the Chats hit the road for just the second time in the League since the turn of the year. 

“It’ll be new for me as I’ve never played Norwich before,” Coombs told us as we looked ahead to a really big game for the Chats Women.

“They were always going to be strong this year and so I was a bit surprised when they were dropping points earlier in the season.”

“They had a tough game against Bedford last weekend – we haven’t played them yet so it will be a little bit of an unknown for us, but I do quite like that because we can be completely focused on ourselves and if we play our game, we can beat anyone in this League.”

“The less we worry about them, the more we focus on ourselves and put things right from last Sunday and hopefully we can go there and do a job!”  

The Chats head to Norfolk on the back of a 2-0 win over London Seaward, a result combined with Norwich’s draw with Real Bedford saw Chatham regain top spot in the table.

Talking to the Chats skipper after the game, she admitted that they’d been in a tough contest – she said, “I think every game in this League is tough and there aren’t any easy games.”

“We had struggled against Seaward before in the League and I don’t think we really got going on Sunday, but we got the win and the clean sheet so we move on.” 

The Chats won 8-0 at Seaward in a Cup-tie just two weeks before and we wondered if that result led the Chats possibly to expect an “easy” game.

“Possibly,” the skipper said, “We spoke about that before the game, so we tried to make sure that we weren’t expecting it to be the same as we knew it wouldn’t be as they have some new players since that game.”

“Evening games are more difficult for some teams than others, but we love night games! Don’t know what it is but we always seem to perform really well in night games so that is something that we must look at, but I don’t know – we had a few days off, that may have been a factor; a different week at training; there’s too many what ifs to know for sure…” 

“We know that we want to try and improve our goal difference, but the most important thing was the three points so we go into Sunday on a positive note and it’s another game in the League that we are unbeaten in.” 

The win at the Bauvill increased the Chats tally to twenty-three points taken from nine games – form which if it can be replicated on the road will certainly take the Kent side to the very verge of promotion back to the Southern division of the National League.

“It’s great that we are really strong at home and we want teams to dread coming to us,” Coombs admitted adding, “How we now turn that into our away games is something that we need to focus on – the travel may play a part in it, but I think we are strong enough as a squad to get around that and adapt to it.”

“We have a lot of away games coming up now (five of the Chats last seven fixtures are away from home), and we need to make sure that we perform just as we do at home!” 

“We just have to focus on ourselves and no one else and win our games so that we can achieve what we want to do this season, so whatever happens it’s in our hands.” 

Picture supplied by Allen Hollands.