Rehanne Skinner is looking forward to seeing West Ham United women’s team continue the positive work that they have already put in across pre-season as they get to work in Western Australia.
The Hammers have been back in training at Chadwell Heath for nearly four weeks and now embark on the next stage of their preparations for the 2024/25 Barclays Women’s Super League Down Under.
Indeed, the team touched down at Perth International Airport on Sunday evening (25 August), and will train for the first time at Macedonia Park on Monday.
Skinner's side are set to join fellow WSL sides Manchester City and Leicester City, and French Division 1 Féminine outfit Paris Saint-Germain, in the inaugural Perth International Football Cup, with the Irons taking on the latter in their opening fixture at 6.15pm AWST on Thursday 29 August at HBF Park.
The winners will take on either Manchester City or Leicester in the final, also at HBF Park, on Sunday 1 September, with the two losers meeting at the same venue in a third-place play-off.
This is the first time the women’s team have travelled abroad for a pre-season tour, and there was an air of excitement amongst players and staff as they arrived at their base of operations in Perth city centre.
For manager Skinner, she believes this trip presents a fantastic opportunity both on and off the pitch. It’s a chance for her side to continue developing crucial components of their play, while also spending valuable time as a group before the new season kicks off…
The players have worked incredibly hard since the beginning of pre-season, and we're ready for the next stage.
We've had some new faces come in and we still don't have everyone back, and so when we get everybody in the same place that'll obviously help things to move forward and to gel a little bit more as a group.
We've seen lots of progress already in pre-season. We've had a couple of pre-season friendlies that have taken place behind closed doors and we’ve been able to get really positive minutes into the tanks of the players that we need ahead of this trip. There were lots of changes in those games, to try and help everybody to build up their fitness at the right pace.
Overall, we're in a really positive place going into our next phase here in Australia.
We've been doing loads of technical based work and trying to get people touches on the ball over the last week or so, and we're ready to build on that now.
Our physical and medical team that worked on the programmes the players did while they were away for the summer have done a great job. Everybody came back in a good place, and then we've started to increase the contact and dealing with the opposition side of things, and that's where we've been leading into most recently, which has obviously prepared us well for Australia.
I think despite the way that everybody's gelling, you do need to still spend a lot of time on building relationships, and that’s going to be an important aspect of the trip.
We've got Dagny [Brynjarsdóttir] back on the pitch, who's not been on the pitch for a year. We've had Kristie [Mewis] out for a period of time, we've got new players in the building and we've got some younger players coming through. That's a lot of different relationships you have to work on, but everybody's just been really involved, very motivated and very focused on improving what we did last year. That's the goal, to improve on what we did last year.
What an exciting opportunity to be out here in Australia for the first tour for the women's team.
It's a fantastic tour to be doing in Australia. For the first tour the women's team have done, what a tour this is to do. I love Perth myself, and there are a lot of players who haven't been to this part of the world before. I think it's just great for team bonding, great for building upon where we are now, and we'll be facing tougher opposition than what we've played in our first pre-season friendlies so far.
This tour gives us an opportunity to really start to build on the way we're trying to play and build more relationships in and amongst the team, on and off the pitch, which is hugely important going into the new season.
We’ve got a number of different things we hope to be able to achieve while we’re here that will help us ahead of the new season.
We're still managing player minutes at the moment, and so they'll start to creep up a little bit. We always turn up to win every game, but we want to make it even more competitive going into these next games now that we've got some minutes in the tank and we're starting to refine little bits around the way we play.
Obviously, we want to try and make things even better going into these next games in Australia and we will have to, because they're going to be even more competitive. In terms of on the grass and around the training we're doing, it's just about continuing to get our principles of play right, so that everybody understands their role within the team and can then carry that out effectively.
Sometimes people think that process happens overnight when you've got a core group that have been here for a while, but it doesn't. New players need to adapt to the way that we’re playing, and also getting the players that have been here for a while back up to speed with things can take a couple of weeks.
We've not had Mini [Katrina Gorry], and we've not had Riko [Ueki] back in with us yet. They were given some time off after the Olympics and will be with us for the first time here in Australia. Bringing them back into the fold is just going to give us another opportunity to push the team further forward.
The tour is going to be great for us on and off the pitch. We'll do a little bit of sightseeing as well, so the players get the most out of the experience because you don't get to this side of the world very often!
Tickets for West Ham’s games against PSG and either Manchester City or Leicester City are available HERE. We will be providing regular updates from Perth during the tour here on www.whufc.com, and on the Club’s official app.
