Rehanne Skinner has hailed her West Ham United women’s team’s 'robust mentality' ahead of their final Barclays Women’s Super League clash of the year, a trip to Aston Villa on Sunday.
The Hammers - who have three successive wins to their name and four victories from their last five matches - could break into the top half of the WSL table with three points at Villa Park this weekend.
Eighth in the standings, Skinner’s side sit one place and two points above the Villans, who will have assistant head coach Shaun Goater in the dugout after former manager Robert de Pauw left the club on Wednesday.
The Irons will be looking to use their red-hot form to bring the curtain down on the year in style at a club that they are yet to lose at in the WSL, having only tasted defeat in two of the ten meetings between the two sides.
But Skinner acknowledged that her side’s impressive streak has not come out of the blue, saluting how hard they have battled against results slipping out of their grasp to get themselves into such a positive position as the season approaches the Christmas break.
As well as praising her team’s never-say-die attitude, Skinner, speaking in her pre-match press conference, also touched on moving in the right direction, the tough test that Aston Villa pose and how she is preparing to take on a different face in the home dugout.
We’re going in a positive direction
We had to work really hard at the start of the season on defensive structure, so it was a case of it being a process, having a bit of patience, letting players bed in, and all those things. We knew what we had in the building, we just needed a little bit of time for them [the new players] to settle in.
You can see the influence the new signings are having and the balance in the squad is better. And seniority as well, there are more experienced players in the team. What we’re getting now is a really positive attacking style of play that is helping us be more successful in front of goal.
The direction we’re going in is really positive across the board, but there’s always things you want to tweak though. We’re never happy managers, are we?
We’re improving across the board
We’re a fraction behind where I wanted us to be at this point. The Everton and Spurs games are the two where I feel we let points go. But we’ve reduced the volume of goals we’ve conceded already in comparison to last year. That’s been significant.
Our goals scored is improving game on game, we’re seeing those [attacking] players come to life more in that sense. And we’ve had different goalscorers as well, that’s important.
Everybody’s worked really, really hard. We’ve had to be patient at times but, as I’ve said before, we’ve been in every game and our performances have been good, we just haven’t quite got the points we’d hoped for. We’re going to go into this Christmas break already in a much more positive place with three wins in three.
With the managerial situation at Aston Villa, we’re just focused on ourselves
I don’t think you have any idea what an interim boss is going to do in such a short space of time. The things that you can control are the things that you do, and what you prepare for. There’s no point worrying about something you can’t control. We just focus on what we already know about them, we know who their likely starters and finishers are, and ultimately, it’s about what we do and how we play.
You have to make sure you’re defensively really organised [when playing Aston Villa]. They’re capable of scoring goals. We just have to make sure we’re more diligent on the road, it’s something we want to be better at.
It’s about being organised and sticking to the gameplan, but having that creativity and confidence that we’ve got going forward. It will be a tough game, a really tough game, but we want to come out on the right side of it.
The squad's mentality has been excellent
You have to have a robust squad, mentally, to ride some of the games we’ve had, and not get something out of it, but still stick at it and be positive. That’s testament to the quality of the players and the attitude of the group. We’ve stayed in that mindset that whole time and that’s why it’s ticked a little bit more in our favour.
Sometimes it’s easy to drop off at those moments. But the way the players have approached everything, stuck together and the way they’ve been prepared to work on improving areas of their game has been fantastic. But we can’t be switching off from one week to the next. In order to be competitive, every week you have to be able to turn up and deliver that [level of performance].
We want to go into Christmas full of momentum
We want to be in that position [with momentum before the Christmas break]. The way the players are motivated towards doing that is excellent, and this week everyone has been really switched on. Every game we play, we try to win. We’ve shown that in every single game. This is just making sure we stick to the job in front of us and hopefully we can go and do that on Sunday.
