Rachel Furness penalty gives Tottenham first Women’s Super League points as they see off Liverpool

• Tottenham 1 (Furness 45+1, pen) Liverpool 0 

Liverpool head coach Vicky Jepson did not dispute that the penalty that condemned her side to their second consecutive defeat - and won newcomers Spurs their first points in the Women’s Super League - was a penalty. Becky Jane brought down the onrushing Rachel Furness inside the area on the stroke of half time and Furness duly dispatched her spot-kick down the middle. Nor did she dispute that Niamh Fahey, in a game brimming with last-ditch challenges and in which Chloe Peplow ended up flying horizontal into an advertising hoarding at one point, deserved the straight red card that pushed an equaliser beyond their grip.

It’s hard to see how she could argue with either, Fahey’s pull on Rosella Ayane inches from the Liverpool box, deep into the second half, blatant and unashamed. What angered her so much was that the game had not been stopped earlier, before Kit Graham even squirrelled the ball through the eye of the needle to Furness, and that her players were left to “get really emotional through poor decisions”.

“We’ll be accountable and 100 per cent look at what we need to better,” she said. “But in that phase of attack before the penalty - which was a penalty - Sophie Bradley-Auckland was fouled and it should have been our free-kick. He let it run and they go and win the game with that penalty.

“We have reviewed the footage already and we have tried to speak to the officials - but they don’t want to see it. Hopefully we can get some answers from the FA next week.

“I know that referees will make mistakes. Nobody’s perfect - but there’s got to be consistency across the league. Today, that official wasn’t good enough and he actually lost control of the game. I saw players in my squad that got really emotional through poor decisions that ended up leaving the field of play.”

It would be difficult to watch Spurs’ first two top-flight games - a narrow 1-0 defeat to Chelsea at Stamford Bridge and this - and come to the conclusion that they won’t be here again next season. They cannot grow complacent, and it is unlikely that they will be when this is a squad still growing accustomed to the relative glamour of professional women’s football.

For many in Karen Hills’ squad, this is their first season without full-time jobs, and the first time that her and Juan Amoros, her joint-head coach, can recall not having to do, as he put it, “a thousand jobs”. Their captain Jenna Schillaci can remember a time when they would struggle to pull eleven players together on Sundays and the form of perhaps their best player in those opening two matches, Ashleigh Neville, is all the more remarkable given she was a teacher as recently as this summer and was playing for Coventry United in the third division in 2017.

Here, again, right back Neville was a persistent menace, and already her partnership down that flank with Gemma Davison has the makings of one of those once-in-a-generation partnerships where the understanding is there from the outset. The snake-hipped Davison revelled in the trickery that tortured Courtney Sweetman-Kirk and Jade Bailey for long spells and her and Neville lived in a flurry of flicks and overlaps, Neville irresistible at either end. Bailey got down low to keep out Neville’s drive from Davison’s lay-off. Davison had a curling effort kept out by Liverpool goalkeeper Anke Preuss, before hitting the side-netting with ten minutes remaining.

For long spells this pair were evenly-matched. Liverpool’s best effort came from Jess Clarke, twisting into a shot from distance that was well-held by Spencer.