Rehanne Skinner insisted West Ham United women’s team have learnt a lot from their ten-day tour to Western Australia, following her side’s 5-2 defeat to Leicester City in the Perth International Football Cup third-place play-off.
After being narrowly beaten 1-0 by French heavyweights Paris Saint-Germain in their opening clash Down Under on Thursday, the Hammers found themselves behind early on against the Foxes when Yuka Momiki opened the scoring on ten minutes.
Further goals from Sam Tierney, Missy Goodwin, Noemie Mouchon and Saori Takarada put Amandine Miquel's charges in a commanding position, before Viviane Asseyi notched two consolation strikes for West Ham late on.
While Skinner was unimpressed by the heavy scoreline, she explained that minutes in the tank for a number of her players, including Dagný Brynjarsdóttir - who hadn’t featured in front of fans since the end of 2022/23 prior to the trip - was among the positives to take home.
There were promising appearances for youngsters such as Ruby Doe and Soraya Walsh against Leicester, and Asseyi’s brace signalled a fast finish from those in Claret and Blue, who will now start their long journey back to the UK on Monday, ahead of the start of their 2024/25 Barclays WSL campaign away to Manchester United on 21 September.
It was a tough start for us, which turned into a pretty tough afternoon.
I thought we started OK on the ball and dominated possession for quite a big chunk, but we just weren’t purposeful with it. We were a bit slow - you could tell there was fatigue in the legs, and I think that’s fairly normal with the journey, the training and the turnaround between the two games.
But, we’ve talked about how we don’t want to make excuses associated with that. We want to make sure we’re competitive in every game, and we’ll keep going with that attitude when we get back.
We’ve used this pre-season tour for what we needed it for, really.
There are some good things - we got Dagný [Brynjarsdóttir] on the pitch for her first 90 minutes for quite a while, and Soraya Walsh and Ruby Doe got minutes and looked bright, so we’re still building up gametime and using the opportunities to get that done.
Kristie [Mewis] played half a game as well - all those things are positives from the game, but obviously the result isn’t acceptable from our point of view. We’ve still got work to do, but we know where we are in pre-season.
The substitutes came on and did well.
I think we were much more effective at that point, and they gave us good energy. We talk about having an impact at the start and at the end, and those that came on as finishers did that. We changed the energy a bit, and I was pleased with how we ended the game.
There are different things to work on, and that’s what you need from pre-season. You have to check where you are - we’ve done that, and we’ll keep working when we’re back in England.
It’s been a fantastic opportunity for all of us to come out here to Perth.
It’s a different experience, because the players have never been on tour before. That’s something new, and an opportunity to bond and do some different things to normal, and see things you wouldn’t see anywhere else in the world, which is really good.
Rottnest Island was fantastic and the way we’ve been looked after has been great. Overall it’s been brilliant to have the team together over here and we want to build on that at home, when we’ll have the whole group together again.
