Wrexham celebrated their Women’s Champions League debut with a thrilling 4-2 victory against FC Pyunik in the first qualifying round semi-final at the Racecourse.<\/p>\n
Jenny Sugarman’s side will face Riga of Estonia – who earlier beat Glentoran 4-1 – in Saturday’s first qualifying round final.<\/p>\n
Wrexham were making their European debut after winning the Adran Premier for the first time in their history last season.<\/p>\n
Their victory was the first time a team from Wales had won a game in the Champions League since Cardiff Met in the 2019-20 season.<\/p>\n
The Armenian champions took the lead after 12 minutes when Susanna Badalya made the most of a poor clearance from the Wrexham keeper Liz Craven to fire home from outside the penalty box.<\/p>\n
The response from Wrexham was instant, a strong run from Faye Knox down the left and her cross was met perfectly by Katie Barker and the goal settled the home side’s nerves.<\/p>\n
Barker, the former Newcastle United striker, came close to scoring a second goal but her effort was saved by the Pyunik goalkeeper Amber Lockwood.<\/p>\n
Wrexham took the lead five minutes after the break when Lili Jones’ right footed shot from the edge of the penalty area took a slight deflection and sailed into the top corner.<\/p>\n
That goal gave the home side the confidence to go and look for the third goal, which eventually came on 62 minutes.<\/p>\n
Lockwood fumbled Lili Jones’ shot and Ava Suckley pounced to tap home from close range.<\/p>\n
However Pyunik kept themselves in the game when Luiza Ghazaryan’s powerful shot gave Craven no chance.<\/p>\n
Wrexham winger Knox then missed a great chance to score Wrexham’s fourth goal but new signing Natasha Thomas sealed a historic victory in the dying stages and she also struck the bar in added time.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wrexham celebrated their Women’s Champions League debut with a thrilling 4-2 victory against FC Pyunik in the first…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":706484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":["post-706483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=706483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/706483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/706484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=706483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=706483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=706483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}