Watford Ladies' boss John Salomon insists his side can drag themselves from the foot of the Women’s Super League 2 table despite suffering a 12th consecutive defeat, 3-1 against Reading in the WSL Cup.

The Lady Hornets are bottom of WSL2 and were unable to boost their confidence with a result in the cup as high-fliers Reading, who are second in the division, visited Berkhamsted on Sunday.

But Salomon believes his team learned from the experience and can be better as a result. He said: “It was a really good performance after about 15 minutes, once we got ourselves going and into the game.

"You can see from the performances how much stronger we are now and how much more resilient this team is than five to eight weeks ago.

"It’s encouraging and certainly the signs are there for us to go and pick up points during the league run-in to make sure we lift ourselves off the bottom of the table.”

The Golden Girls started the match slowly and were made to pay for it as Laura-May Walkley and Bianca Bragg built a two-goal cushion for the visitors inside ten minutes.

Watford’s Stacie Donnelly halved the deficit after 26 minutes but four minutes after the break, Reading put the result beyond doubt with an Emma Follis strike. But Salomon’s side have now found the net five times in three matches, something that has pleased the boss.

“We’ve worked on our play going forward,” he said. “We’ve tried to focus more on the attacking aspect, saying: ‘you know what, let’s just have a go at teams’.

“Maybe attack is the best form of defence and we should just try and get forward a little bit more, be a bit more creative and inventive in our play.”

Watford travel to London Bees tomorrow in WSL2.