Canberra United coach Rae Dower declared that she will not let her side’s Semi Final defeat to Sydney FC define their season, after going down in controversial circumstances on Sunday.

In front of a more than 2,000 fans at McKellar Park in the nation’s capital, Jasmyne Spencer scored the only goal after Lydia Williams appeared to be fouled by Kyah Simon as she went for the ball. Dower however refused to be drawn into criticising the performance of the six match officials on the day.

“Women’s coaches are the same as female footballers; we don’t earn enough money in the game to cop the fine I would get if I tell you what I really think.”

“You’ve seen it all yourselves, you’ll see it all repeated, and the worst thing is that we’re talking about that [the goal] rather than a game of football.”

While disappointed that her side did not take the chances they created throughout the match, Dower said she was proud of the way her side had gone about attempting to defend their Westfield W-League Championship crown.

“I told the girls how proud I was of them, and I didn’t want today to define our season.

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“I think that would be unfair. I think that as a team we’ve grown throughout the season and unfortunately we didn’t bring our best display today.”

“We set ourselves a really ambitious goal at the beginning of the year, no team has ever gone back to back, we know that and everyone has sort of hidden from that the last few years but we wanted to embrace it.”

Signing off for the season, both Dower and Captain Nicole Begg were full of praise for the raucous home crowd at McKellar Park, not only today but throughout the season.

“That’s what a lot of the talk has been this week, how excited we have been to play in front of a packed crowd at McKellar,” said Begg.

“And the fans are always so loud. And when you do start getting so many people in, it feels like you have 30-40 thousand people here.”

Dower was equally impressed.

“Great crowd, couldn’t be happier with the crowd. The local sponsors have got behind us all year.

“The crowd has got behind us all year. We hope that they enjoyed the day and we thank them for all their support this season.”