Paul Konchesky says his West Ham United Women's side gave it everything they had in their Vitality Women's FA Cup fifth-round defeat by Aston Villa on Sunday afternoon.
After a 1-1 draw in normal time, when former Hammer Rachel Daly's goal was cancelled out by a late Dagný Brynjarsdóttir leveler, and a tense period of extra time, penalties were required to settle the tie at Chigwell Construction Stadium.
The shootout went to sudden-death after Grace Fisk and Jordan Nobbs had missed their spot-kicks. After Aston Villa goalkeeper Hannah Hampton had blasted her effort into the back of the net, Mackenzie Arnold stepped up to face her opposite number and fired over the crossbar.
While Konchesky was disappointed to see his side beaten in such heartbreaking fashion, he praised their comeback and overall work ethic in forcing the game to penalties.
We did really well to fight back in the way that we did.
I thought it was a game of two halves out there today. We were really disappointed with the goal that we conceded, but I was really pleased with how we managed to get ourselves back into the game.
There's not a better time to score - Dagný scoring in the last moments of normal time gave us a lot of momentum going into extra-time, but we just couldn't find the goal that we needed so that penalties weren't required.
It was tough for the team. Playing 120 minutes is always tough, particularly when you have had players away on international duty. Some of them are still jet-lagged and have played three games in the past week.
My team are still learning, and they're defiant.
We make it really hard for teams to come and play here in almost all of the games we've had this season.
I think we proved that today, we soaked up the pressure when we had to, and I thought that we were really good on the counter-attack.
It's not easy to step up and take a penalty.
The first five who stepped up all wanted to take one, and then after that you're into those players who perhaps aren't as confident.
Fair play to the girls for stepping up because it's not easy. Someone has to win and someone has to lose and unfortunately we were the losing side today.
We've shown resilience today that we can take back into the league campaign.
It's not nice to be out because we all really wanted another strong cup run, but I think we've shown again that we're tough to beat and that's a good thing.
We've got a really tough end to the season, so we will need all of the players to fight in every single match the way that they have today.
Hopefully we can keep picking up points and take the club to a higher points tally than it had last season.
We have to take things one game at a time, so now all attention moves onto Reading on Sunday.
