Rehanne Skinner was pleased that West Ham United women’s team came from behind to beat Charlton Athletic 2-1 in their first Continental Tyres League Cup group stage fixture of 2023/24.
The Irons fell behind after 20 minutes when Carla Humphrey found the back of the net, but they bounced back after half-time.
Emma Harries netted her first goal for the Club just before the hour mark, before Izzy Atkinson netted the all-important winner on 77 minutes to clinch the game.
The Hammers had to be on their guard towards the end as Charlton piled on the pressure, but debutant Megan Walsh denied the Addicks an equaliser deep into added time.
Skinner was pleased with the resilience that her side showed in finding a way to come back and win the game, making it two wins in as many matches in the past week.
The boss shared her thoughts with West Ham TV at the full time whistle...
Tonight’s game gave us challenges to solve.
It was a great opportunity to have everybody in the squad taking part and getting some minutes. It was a good test, Charlton gave us a really good battle today, and I was pleased with the resilience and the character in the team to come back from behind and go on and win the game.
Again, our finishers had an impact coming onto the pitch and that’s what we need the whole squad to do for us.
We started slower than we wanted to.
We were disappointed collectively with the first 25 minutes of the game because we felt like we started slowly, and obviously put ourselves in a position where we had to try and fight to get back in the game.
But again, we fought until the end, never giving up and making life difficult for Charlton. We could have had more chances but, to be fair to Charlton, they had some good chances as well, which meant we had to defend resolutely in those moments.
We’re keeping up the work on the way that we’re building in possession. There’s definitely times where we could have received to play forward a little bit more and punished them.
Every game we’re learning and every game we’re trying to improve, and that’s happened again tonight.
The players did a lot of the talking themselves in the changing room at half-time.
They did that because in the last 15 minutes of the first half we were so much better, and we’d recognised the areas of weakness that we could exploit a little bit more.
We’d managed to do that just before half-time, and it was about continuing to do those things that were going to help us to be more effective.
We had two more really good opportunities that we didn’t take as calmly or as composed as we would have wanted to, but we’ll keep working on that moving forward.
We have some real wins to be celebrating after every game at the moment.
It was great for Emma [Harries] to get her first goal for the Club, and we had a debut for Megan Walsh [in goal].
Emma has been working incredibly hard all of pre-season. She is one of those people who you know is always going to play as hard as she can for as long as she can, which is a great asset to have in the team.
Everyone is rising to that as well, and that’s what we’re going to need throughout the course of the season.
On the pitch, winning is a habit and we’ve got to try and make sure that we keep working hard to achieve that. The confidence helps people to settle into the way that we’re trying to play. We’re not getting that right all of the time at the moment, and that’s okay. But players are now recognising when it’s not going right and how to start to fix that on the pitch.
That leads to better communication, leading to more teamwork on the pitch, problem solving together and ultimately, that will stand us in good stead when we get that right more frequently.
We’ll be as ready as we possibly can be for Saturday against Chelsea [in the WSL at Kingsmeadow].
It’s been a busy week and, having the game on the Saturday limits the recovery between all three games [after the WSL win at Brighton last Sunday]. Players want to play games, though, and that’s the most important thing.
We’ll make sure that we’re ready to go again in the league on Saturday.
