Rehanne Skinner was disappointed with the start West Ham United women’s team made in their 5-0 defeat to Manchester City on Sunday afternoon.
The Irons found themselves two goals down inside four minutes at Joie Stadium, with strikes from Leila Ouahabi and Bunny Shaw giving the Citizens a lightning start in front of their own fans.
Shaw was able to grab another 20 minutes later, and in the second half Laura Blindkilde Brown and Jess Park added further goals to inflict a heavy defeat on the east Londoners.
Despite the one-sided scoreline, the Hammers had a handful of very good opportunities in the clash, with Khiara Keating and the woodwork denying Viviane Asseyi, while Riko Ueki and Jess Ziu were also denied by the frame of the goal in a solid spell either side of half-time.
Skinner vented her frustrations at aspects of her side's performance at full-time, and thanked the West Ham fans that had made the trip north to follow the team.
We’re disappointed with the way we started the game.
We can’t concede early goals like that because it creates a real mountain to climb, and so we’re really disappointed with that and we spoke about that at half-time.
Just before the break, I think we were much better. We were more aggressive with the press, and we created a couple of chances before half-time as well.
In the second half, for the first 30 minutes we were much better, much more like us as we tried to give a good account of ourselves. Overall, we had five clear-cut chances in the game, hit the woodwork three times and then had other chances before the back post. They were big chances that could change the landscape of any game.
It wasn’t to be today, and we’re disappointed that we weren’t able to give a good account of ourselves for the 90 minutes.
You don't want to concede a goal, but we then allowed that to affect what happens next.
When they scored two of their goals, it was within five minutes of each other as well, and those are bits that we have to get better at as well, because it's just that switch off moment. It's disappointing for everybody, because for large parts over the course of the season, I think we've managed that better, and ultimately, today, we’ve dipped back into that.
The biggest thing for us is just being consistent. For anyone who watched the game, you can see there's times where we control possession, where we moved the ball really well and we created good chances. It's just that we have to be consistent with delivering that.
The goals that we had an opportunity to take, those are real positive moments in the game, but we just weren't clinical enough to finish them.
That’s something we want to keep working on. We've had some ups and downs with that in front of goal over the course of the season, and ultimately that's the difference at the moment.
City have had many years to be able to kind of build this team to be clinical in those moments. That's something we have to keep striving towards in order to be more competitive in the league.
We have to make sure we take the learnings and move on, but ultimately we want to make sure we produce for the fans week in, week out.
I’m really apologetic to them about the result for sure, it's not what we wanted to come here and do. We appreciate the support from the fans, and we'll make sure we work even harder to get a result for them next week on the road.
