Rehanne Skinner is hoping that West Ham United women's team will build on their showing last time out against Manchester City when they head to Brighton & Hove Albion this weekend.
The Hammers boss was pleased with aspects of the teams performance against the Citizens in their Barclays Women's Super League opener, but two moments of quality from the away side early in the second half proved to be the difference as they slipped to a 2-0 defeat.
But after another positive week of work on the training pitch, Skinner's team are ready to go again, this time up against Mel Phillips' Brighton. The Seagulls won their opening fixture of the new campaign, beating Everton 2-1 at Walton Hall Park.
The boss spoke with whufc.com ahead of Sunday’s 12pm BST kick off at Broadfield Stadium…
The team have trained really well this week in preparation for the game
There was lots of things to take out of the game last weekend that we wanted to try.
First of all, we wanted to utilise the things that we thought we did well, and then secondly, tweak a couple of things, because we're obviously still on a journey of building how we play and being able to get that right, consistently.
So this week has been really positive. The energy has been great in the team, and everybody's looking forward to the weekend.
The approach and attitude from the players have been superb
I think the biggest thing is [with our style of play], it's an adjustment, and so game on game, we'll be able to put those things into place and implement them with more confidence with more consistency, with everybody understanding their roles really clearly, under different types of pressure against different styles within other teams.
That takes a little bit of time to be able to really test you on how you're able to implement what you want to do on a week to week basis against different styles and approaches.
We’re familiar with Brighton, having faced off against them in pre-season
I think the biggest thing for us to focus on is improving our performance against what we produced when we played them in preseason, as well as hitting the benchmarks within that game that we want to hit.
Every game is a different test, it will be a slightly different one to what we faced against Man City, but equally, we still need to be able to play that we want to play against those different spaces that you want to exploit or opportunities that you're going to get slightly differently.
We head into a run of games that will help the team gel even more.
Having three games in under a week will help us to keep trying to build relationships on the pitch.
But clearly, with having three games in such a short space of time, it’s a test of the whole squad, because you need the whole squad for the whole season, definitely you need them when you've got three games in quick succession.
It's an opportunity for us to try and ensure that everybody is involved and contribute in in a way that essentially uses our entire squad to help us to get results.
How we manage the players in between the games is obviously a key part of the process with recovery elements and that's helping to prepare them for performance mindset for every single game that we have.
