There’s no substitute for first-team experience says Leeds United Women’s captain Catherine Hamill

It’s great to see young players like Joe Gelhardt and Crysencio Summerville coming on and wanting to prove themselves. Having people who can come off the bench and change the game is really important.

We had young Izzy Elliott from the under-23s playing with us for the first time this weekend as we beat Redcar Town 4-0 in the FA Cup.

While Rebekah Bass is waiting for the results of a scan, we had Olivia Smart shuffle across to right-back and brought 16-year-old Izzy in to play in her preferred position at left-back. She got stuck in right away and played really well.

I think that when the under-23s come up to the senior team, players can benefit from that feeling of having nothing to lose.

You want to prove yourself and you want to stay in the team, but you know that you’ve still got time to go back and develop further, so it’s a win-win.

The pressure’s off, so you can afford to try something a bit different, and if you pull it off, it does wonders for your confidence.

When I left the centre of excellence to start playing open age football, the different style of play took some getting used to.

After a stint at full-back I started playing centre-back at 17, which is really young for that position – normally you’ll have older, more experienced players in there.

So I remember feeling really young, but I got to grips with it before long.

In open age, for example, I noticed they played a long ball more often, and I soon learned how to judge when they were coming – watching for the player to look up and taking the cue to drop back a bit.

My opponents were much stronger than me, and you get more vocal players coming at you so it was very different in that sense too!

That was definitely the case for Izzy on Sunday. The Redcar players got a bit frustrated towards the end.

There was a red card, a few comments flying back and forth, and it did seem to get a bit heated at one point.

You don’t experience that kind of situation too much when you’re playing at the Regional Talent Centre, so it was likely a new situation for Izzy as she only left in May – she didn’t seem too fazed by it, though!

When you’re losing, it can be tempting to get involved in arguments but when you’re comfortably ahead and on track to win, as we were, it was easy to ignore.

It took us some time to settle into it, but once Hannah Freibach got our first goal half an hour in, we got a proper grip on the game and we were 3-0 up at half-time.

After we gave up a three-goal cushion to draw against Durham Cestria a couple of weeks ago, I felt we did a much better job of managing the game this time around.

There wasn’t much point pushing for more goals in the second half – we might have done in a league game to boost our goal difference, but it makes no odds for the Cup – so we tried to keep the ball and pass it between us along the back.

It might have been a bit boring to watch, but the main thing is we got our names in the hat for the next round of the competition.

We’ve been drawn against Hartlepool United for the first round proper, which we’ll play on November 14.