CHERRIES vice skipper Abbie Jones believes her side’s performance against second-tier Charlton Athletic will help them in their promotion push from the FA Women’s National League Division One South West.

After keeping the highest-ranked side in the competition at bay in the first-half of their third round FA Cup tie, Cherries were powerless to prevent Championship leaders Charlton from winning 6-0 at Vitality Stadium on Sunday.

However, Jones believed her semi-professional teammates had shown their best qualities against full-time opposition.

She explained to the Daily Echo: “I'm really proud of the team.

“First half especially, we didn't have much of the ball, but we defended for our lives and everyone was working hard.

“The desire to try and win the ball back and the desire to push on forward when we did win the ball back was really good.

“So it's definitely something we're striving for to be in that position, in a higher league, and hopefully in the years to come, we can do that.”

“It's a couple of leagues away but I think 0-0 after 45 minutes shows our determination in our side and how much quality we have.

“We know we're pushing for promotion in this league. So we need to really need to get that this season to be able to strive for the next one.

“The Exeter game got cancelled last weekend, we were gutted about that to be honest.

“But it gave us more preparation time for this one and we know that that served us well, especially in the first half from the result.

“But definitely we can take this experience into opposition like Exeter and really push on and hopefully win the league.”

Cherries have made plenty of history in 2023, breaking the attendance record for a women’s match on two occasions, before reaching the third round of the FA Cup for the first time.

And whilst Sunday’s attendance was someway off the 6,805 that watched the victory over Portishead in November, Jones believes a lot of people deserved credit for getting a crowd nearing the region of 2,000 in at Dean Court at such short notice.

Asked if the side often thought about the history they were creating, Jones replied: “It's something we think about along the way.

“So when we played at the stadium a few weeks ago, we had around 7000 people and that was our highest ever attendance.

“And then this game got announced at the stadium nine days ago.

“And to be able to have between 1000 and 2000 people here today is a really, really impressive thing, to be honest.

“And that goes to all the people behind the scenes all the media team doing all the hard work. We're just the ones that play and put on the performance at the end of the day.

“But definitely having all the fans behind us helps and hopefully we can have more in the coming weeks.”