Billy McKinlay believes the challenge posed to West Ham United by Stade Rennais was exactly what the Hammers needed.
The Irons fell to a 3-1 defeat at Roazhon Park on Saturday evening as the French side claimed the pre-season victory.
Baptiste Santamaria’s stunning long-range strike in the first-half was cancelled out by Tomáš Souček, who headed in a leveller for the Hammers on 66 minutes.
Amid a host of substiutions, including nine for the home side, Stade Rennais re-took the lead when Arnaud Kalimuendo flicked home from close range, before Angelo Ogbonna's unfortunate own-goal late on secured the win for the Ligue 1 outfit.
Bruno Génésio's team were always going to prove a tough test for the Hammers, with Stade Rennais regularly finishing in the upper echelons of the French top flight and playing European football on a consistent basis. But, with two weeks to go until the start of the Premier League season, McKinlay felt such a challenge was suitable for the east London side.
The assistant coach was also delighted to see Paquetá get his first pre-season match minutes under his belt, while also commending the levels shown by the West Ham players.
This was a really good test for our lads.
We expected that. It was the game we needed after the last two or three that we’ve been involved in. We knew it was going to be a difficult game and that’s what it turned out to be.
We’re going to start the Premier League season at AFC Bournemouth so we’re going to be straight at it, in terms of the levels that come with being in the Premier League, so we need to play games like this that are going to give us the best preparation for that. We understand that and this was a really, really tough game for us.
We’re disappointed with some aspects of it and pleased with some other aspects, but it was just what was needed for the team.
I think we’re happy with where the lads are at. We’ve got a bit of work to do, as we could see, and I think we tired a little bit in the end.
They made more changes than we did and I think they saw the benefit of that. They played some good stuff, but so did we, but once they made the changes and freshened it up then we were slowing a bit in term of the physical aspect.
But that’s what we need when we’ve got two weeks to go. We’ve still got work to do to make sure we are ready.
It was good to see Lucas Paquetá come in and get his first minutes of pre-season under his belt.
That’s his first minutes and he’s played nearly 70 minutes for us. Okay he was tiring towards the end but he needed it. It was great to get him back and to see him out there on the pitch.
We’ve been pretty fragmented with pre-season this year.
The international boys came back while we were in Australia, which we knew was going to be the case, but this is the first week that we’ve had everybody back, working together and preparing.
It’s been slightly different, with different stages of fitness among the boys, so it was good to get this week under our belt. It’s been a good week, a hard week, but we loaded it on purpose so the boys would work really hard. This game will be a really good work-out for them and we’ll be ready to go at it again on Monday.
