Charlton Athletic 0-0 Leicester City
(Charlton win 2-1 on penalties)<\/p>\n
Charlton have been promoted to the Women’s Super League after a heroic penalty shoot-out performance from Republic of Ireland goalkeeper Sophie Whitehouse in Saturday’s promotion\/relegation play-off against Leicester City.<\/p>\n
Former Athlone Town and Shamrock Rovers stopper Katie Keane was in the opposition goal as the game finished 0-0 after extra-time, requiring penalties to decide the promotion-relegation game.<\/p>\n
Whitehouse saved four penalties, including one from her Ireland team-mate Heather Payne who came on for the Foxes at the start of extra-time.<\/p>\n
Keane pulled off two shootout saves but it was not enough, Whitehouse’s exceptional display swinging it Charlton’s way.<\/p>\n
It was a relatively busy day for both goalkeepers who were forced into several saves in the latter stages of the game.<\/p>\n
Charlton did have the ball in the net on 97 minutes but it was disallowed for a very narrow off-side decision.<\/p>\n
Payne also had a golden chance to put Leicester ahead in the 107th minute when she got on the end of a corner kick but Whitehouse produced a brilliant save.<\/p>\n
Charlton join Birmingham City and Crystal Palace in the WSL while Leicester drop down to the WSL2.<\/p>\n
“In pre-season we spoke about this thing called ‘the pit’, which is one of the hardest fitness tests we’ve ever done, and today we said it’s like that and we have to go again, again and again,” Whitehouse told BBC Sport afterwards.<\/p>\n
“Pain is temporary and look what happens.<\/p>\n
“Every single game is so important in this league and it’s been so competitive. To be honest it has been one of my hardest seasons because we have been so focused. I haven’t been thinking about anything else. We managed to get it over the line. I just can’t believe it.”<\/p>\n
Watch the Women’s Champions League final, Barcelona v Lyon, on Saturday from 4.30pm on RT\u00c92 and RT\u00c9 Player<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Charlton Athletic 0-0 Leicester City(Charlton win 2-1 on penalties) Charlton have been promoted to the Women’s Super League…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":463754,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[61,60,112],"class_list":["post-463753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=463753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/463753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/463754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=463753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=463753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=463753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}