Chatham Town Women to host Norwich City this Sunday at the Bauvill Stadium in a crucial Division 1 South East clash

Chatham Town Women need a result against free-scoring Norwich City this Sunday if they want to stay in the hunt for promotion, says their manager.

City are the top scorers in Division 1 South East - averaging four goals a game - and they sit second in the table behind a Fulham side who are the only team to have taken points off them.

Chatham are among a group of teams chasing those two leading sides.

“It’s a massive game,” said manager Keith Boanas.

“They lost at the weekend in the cup against Brighton’s development team and they’re going to want to bounce back.

“They have weapons in their side that can hurt us, as they did last year, but we can work on that. They used the long throw last year to good effect. Both games last year were close but we lost them both.

“We have got to get a result out of it to stay in the hunt because those top two can easily break away from the rest.”

Boanas was impressed with how his team handled last midweek’s Isthmian League Cup game against local rivals Dartford.

They’d been 2-0 down against Cambridge United in their previous match before the game got abandoned, but won the cup contest 2-1, in what was, as expected, a battle.

Boanas said: “We had a blip in the game against Cambridge United, and hopefully that was a warning sign. It seemed the players heeded it because of the mentality they showed against Dartford.

“We knew it was going to be a battle, but our players were more on it and more focused.

“In the Cambridge game we had some players who didn’t turn up on the day, for whatever reason. A couple of individual errors have been owned up to and when we play Cambridge again we’ll know their threats.”

Boanas’ team will be playing away to Exeter City the following week in the FA Women’s