Rehanne Skinner has called for West Ham United women’s team to start their final Barclays Women’s Super League home fixture of 2023/24 on the front foot this weekend.
The Irons welcome Leicester City to Chigwell Construction Stadium on Sunday for a 3pm kick off (click here to buy your tickets), and Skinner is hoping to see her side pick up more points in their quest to finish as high in the league standings as possible come the end of the season.
With just two matches left, West Ham would move level on points with Leicester, who sit one place above them in the table, with victory on Sunday.
Skinner spoke with media in Thursday’s pre-match press conference and gave her thoughts on how the Club has progressed during the first season of her tenure, as well her musings on Sunday’s opposition and an update on team news ahead of the clash.
You can listen to the full pre-match press conference by clicking play on the audio player above, or read on for the key talking points…
End of season ambitions
Last weekend [a 1-1 draw with Aston Villa] was a great response to the City game. I think we played really well and got through a lot of the things that we wanted to.
The late equaliser is great and I’m really happy from that side of things, but given the chances we had, we were disappointed we didn’t take all three points out of the game.
We want as many points as we can and we know that Leicester are only three points ahead of us in the table.
It would be good to jump above them before the end of the season, and given the nature of this league, that’s certainly possible for us. We’d like to finish a little bit higher if we can because it’s been what we’ve been working to do all season.
Beating the press
I think Leicester’s principles under the new management team are still the same. They’re still working really hard out of possession, and out of all of the teams, they probably press the highest out of everybody.
A couple of players, particularly [Jutta] Rantala and [Yuka] Momiki have been fantastic for them and they’ve had a massive impact on their squad. We know that we had a really tough game against them earlier on in the season, but it was a game where I felt we should have been a couple ahead at half time, and instead we had to rely on a late goal at the end.
We want to rectify that and start more on the front foot and be a little more clinical this time around.
We’ll have everyone available as we did last weekend against Aston Villa, and we haven’t got any fresh concerns, so that is good.
Building for next season
Behind the scenes, there’s been so much work done to get all of the foundations in place. There have been players signed to try and evolve the squad and build the depth and things like that, and Leicester have done the same. And I think now, realistically, we want to try and finish the season off with a bit of consistency to kind of get over the hump with some of those things.
We have got better foundations right here, right now. But next year, we know what we've got to do a little bit more, and we're going to add players to that to make sure that helps move in the right direction. I think it's always easy isn't it to assume things should happen overnight, but there's so many changes, and there's loads of stuff that's going on when you are changing the philosophy and the playing style.
I've been really happy with the way that the individuals have improved and the way that we're putting together the style. It’s evident what we’re trying to do, and I think players have done really really well within it for the large part.
I don't think we've done enough 90 minute games of that. And that's then the thing that ultimately costs you the result, if we'd have played like we're capable of for 90 minutes in several of these games, then, you know, our points would be very different. That's the learning curve, isn't it? That's where we've got to get to.
