Shannon Cooke believes that West Ham United women's team can draw positives from their recent match against Manchester City and build on their performance in their upcoming fixtures against Brighton & Hove Albion in the Barclays Women’s Super League.
Cooke made her first start for the Irons in the opening day defeat to City, where second half goals from Lauren Hemp and Jill Roord were the difference last Sunday at Chigwell Construction Stadium.
Indeed, it was only the central defenders third appearance for the Club since joining in January, having previously appeared off the bench in matches against Chelsea and Manchester United.
Next up are Brighton, who began the new campaign with a 2-1 victory over Everton, and Cooke believes that they will offer a different type of challenge.
She spoke to whufc.com ahead of the weekend’s fixture.
It felt really good to make my first start for the Club last time out
It’s been a long time coming, but I’ve just been keeping my head down and working hard – it’s nice to reap the rewards of that and start a match and play 90 minutes.
That’s that goal I’ve been working towards, and I was happy with my performance overall. Hopefully this will just be the start for me personally and I can keep getting minutes consistently throughout the season.
It was frustrating to come away from our first game without any points
We know that City are a top team, and I thought they played well. The game has given us positives to take and things to work on. I thought that we gave the ball away too cheaply at times, and we could have looked after it better than we did.
I thought we started the game really well, but conceding early in the second half was a real sucker punch. But now we can definitely take some of the good bits that we showed into the game on Sunday against Brighton.
We had a gameplan that went well in the first half, but as I said, conceding the goal stopped us in our tracks a little bit. We grew into the game again after the sending off, but we can’t always rely on something like that happening to change the game, so it’s something to work on.
It was a long wait to be back in competitive action
Pre-season games are great, and obviously you still want to win those, but being back in WSL action felt that different bit different.
We’re definitely going into the game against Brighton with confidence. We’ve been working this week on what to expect from them. They’re obviously a little bit different in terms of personnel from when we faced them at the end of last season.
We have to play to our strengths and stick to our gameplan, if we do that then I believe we will come away with some points. We know they will provide a different kind of test to what we faced last weekend.
We want to get our first win on the board, and Sunday presents a really good chance to do so.
I’ve really enjoyed working under Rehanne and her coaching team.
The first couple of months have been really good, and I think we’re definitely heading in the right direction. I like the vision and I like what she’s trying to do, and I think as players, we’ve all bought into that.
She’s created an environment that is really helping us a players and I believe that it will bring the best out of everyone.
