Japanese new signings star as Leicester thrash Birmingham | EUROtoday

Leicester City 6 Birmingham City 2

The high quality of Leicester’s two new Japanese signings, Saori Takarada and Yuka Momiki, shone by way of as they got here from behind to beat Birmingham City 6-2 to achieve the Women’s FA Cup quarter-finals.

Leicester supervisor Willie Kirk hailed the influence of the duo, who have been each signed from Swedish aspect Linkoping in January, praising Takarada’s shut management and lauding Momiki’s “moments of magic”, after a day the place their technical skills stood out on a bobbly pitch.

“They’ve settled in so quickly. They’re just fantastic, fantastic football players,” Kirk stated. “Saori knows that the quality of her touch will give her time, and even when she’s tightly-pressed, it will allow her to have those extra couple of seconds, because she protects it so well. You could give it to her in a phonebox and you’d struggle to get it off her.

“When Saori signed, in particular, I think I said she was the ‘missing link’, and I think you can see that a lot of things go through her, or she gets involved in most passages of play at some point.

“Yuka just continually shows flashes of magic, which is great to watch for the supporters and for us. They’ve been really important.”

Momiki, who scored in eight consecutive video games for Linkopings instantly previous to her change to Leicester, demonstrated nice steadiness, utilising her low centre of gravity to show defenders with ease, and imaginative and prescient, taking part in in a free-looking position roughly as a quantity 10.

In the deep-lying midfield position, Takarada was discovering time to show and launch excellent cross-field balls out huge to nice impact within the first half, and he or she supplied a neatly-threaded help by way of for Janice Cayman to fit in Leicester’s equaliser to make it 1-1, after Birmingham had gone forward inside two minutes. The underdogs had netted from the match’s first set-piece, courtesy of a Missy Goodwin personal objective.