Pride was the overriding emotion for Ipswich Town Ladies’ manager Ralph Pruden after their Suffolk Women’s Cup final success against Lowestoft Town, as he hailed an excellent team performance from his side, writes Tom Mortlock.

Following the impressive 5-0 victory, Pruden said: “I’m really proud of them. There were a lot of strong performances tonight. As a team, we performed very well.

“We spoke a lot about going into the game as favourites to win it. We knew that there would be a lot of pressure on us, especially in the first twenty minutes or so.

“Getting a goal early on really settled us and instantly put that pressure on Lowestoft. From then on, we managed little passages of the play, scored some good goals and were full value for the 5-0 scoreline.”

Ipswich led 2-0 at the interval, but needed to ensure that they stayed alert in the second half and this was at the forefront of Pruden’s mind at half time.

He said: “It was a good first half from us, but there were bits to improve. It’s easy to go out and say that the game is won, but we wanted to make sure that we kept things tight. We made it very hard for Lowestoft and kept the clean sheet, which we are delighted about.”

Town’s boss praised his players for their work ethic over recent weeks, despite an indifferent league campaign.

They can now only finish as high as seventh in the FA WPL South East Division One, a league of twelve teams.

He said: “We’ve had a tough season if I’m honest. We haven’t been where we’ve wanted to be for all of it, but they’ve really pulled together over the past month and worked hard for this. This is the reward for that. We’ve done really well and they fully deserve this.”

Ipswich captain Aimee Harrison also spoke of her pride for the team afterwards.

She said: “It’s well deserved. We knew that it was going to be a tough game but we were definitely the better team. We’ve done ourselves proud.”