Rehanne Skinner hopes that her West Ham United women’s team will be able to come away with victory from their final match of the Perth International Football Cup.
The Hammers take on Leicester City in the competition's third-place play-off on Sunday, and after plenty of positive signs during their narrow 1-0 defeat to Paris Saint-Germain earlier on their trip to Western Australia, Skinner is looking for a similar performance against familiar opposition.
Having previously worked for the Foxes at the beginning of her coaching career, the now Hammers manager is expecting another beneficial test from the match at HBF Park.
And with less than 72 hours between the side's two matches, Skinner confirmed that minutes will continue to be managed out in Perth as preparations continue for the beginning of the new Barclays WSL campaign, which all starts for West Ham against Manchester United on Saturday 21 September.
The PSG game falls on the Irons' final full day Down Under, with the team flying back home on Monday.
Ahead of the match, Skinner gave an insight into the training sessions between the clashes, what impressed her in the narrow loss to PSG and what fans can expect to see from her team on the pitch…
It’s a really quick turnaround between the two games.
We had the opportunity to give the players a day off on Friday. The players went out to Rottnest Island and were able to see what Australia is all about, which was really nice.
Training on Saturday was a little bit of an odd one because we were matchday plus two and also matchday minus one, but ultimately it was about building on the things we’ve been working on throughout the week. It’s our fourth match of pre-season and we’ll be looking to build on the good things from our performance on Thursday, as well as our fitness overall.
It was a really solid performance from everybody against PSG.
We were very good in terms of our shape and how the team worked together to try and make life difficult for PSG. We didn’t get broken through in central areas and I thought we limited them to very few chances.
Everybody needs to be given an opportunity in pre-season and we want to keep tinkering with a couple of things to see what will be the best fit for us going into the season. Obviously not all of the players are with us at the moment, so we will have more fixtures to come in the UK.
Rotating players is something we’ll continue to do throughout pre-season.
Some people’s minutes are being managed at this stage, and we’re progressing to some players being able to play 90 minutes.
The players that played international football over the summer are the ones that we’re making sure are moving at the right pace so that they’re ready for the first game of the new season.
Playing against Leicester is a great test for us ahead of the new season.
They showed that they are a tough team when they played against Manchester City in their match on Wednesday, and have had an additional day of work due to the way that the schedule has worked.
They have some quality, and we'll have to make sure that we continue with all of the good things that we did in our last match and come away with a positive result to end a really successful tour.
