The young Redbacks hosted the runaway competition leaders on Saturday and held their own, opening the scoring after 10 minutes through captain Sophie Milton.

The goal stung Adamstown into action, with the visitors scoring twice before the break including one on the stroke of halftime.

Adamstown scored two more in the second half but McBeath said he was pleased with the improvement his young team has shown this season.

“We are a team of 15 and 16-year-old girls really playing against mature football players,” he said.

“That’s how you learn though, playing against quality players and we’ve got a taste of it now that we can play good football.

“It’s only our first season in the WPL and our girls have not played at this level before.

“I’m really happy with the way we’ve improved, even the Adamstown team were telling us after the game how much we’ve improved since we first played them.”

McBeath said there were many positives from the performance.

“It was a good game, Adamstown are ­obviously a good team but we played really well,” he said.

“We held the ball a lot more and played out, we used the width of the park and did what good teams do against a very good team.

“They (Adamstown) deserved to win but we were much better.”

McBeath said he had one goal for his team for the final four rounds of the season - to keep improving.

“There’s only a month left and we want to keep improving each week,” he said.

“Sometimes we don’t believe in ourselves enough but we’ve shown we can do it.”

Elsewhere in the Women’s Premier League, Valentine upset the Under 18s Emerging Jets 6-3 while Merewether United downed Mid North Coast 2-0.