Rehanne Skinner insists her West Ham United women’s team are looking to rectify Sunday’s defeat to Chelsea in their Subway Women’s League Cup quarter-final at Tottenham Hotspur on Wednesday night.
The Hammers will go toe-to-toe with their Barclays Women’s Super League rivals for a spot in the final four of the competition - something Skinner did as Spurs manager for the first time in the Lillywhites’ history in 2021/22.
Skinner's current team West Ham, who have a 100 per cent record in the competition so far this term, were able to use victories in the cup against London City Lionesses and Southampton to piece together a run of four wins from five matches ahead of the Christmas break.
And while there are busy weeks in store for the women’s team, competing in three different competitions across back-to-back three-game weeks, they present an opportunity to create momentum for the side ahead of the second half of the campaign.
Here is what the manager said ahead of Wednesday’s quarter-final tie...
We’re hoping Dagný will be available for the game
Dagný Brynjarsdóttir picked up an injury that ruled her out of the squad at the weekend, and she's looking at being fit and available for Wednesday.
We want to be successful in every competition we’re in
For us, for the fans, we want to be successful in every competition we're in, of course we do. We've got to make sure that we're being competitive in this league, and that's showing the progress of evolving the squad if we can do that. We want to make sure that we're giving the best account of ourselves all the time.
We want to be in the semi-final, we want to progress next week in the Women’s FA Cup, and we want six points out of the next two league games. It doesn't necessarily mean that all those things are going to happen, but we're certainly going to give it our best.
Everyone will be needed over the next few weeks
We've got a good-sized squad with a lot of seniors that have got a lot of experience, and we need to be able to call on those experiences in and amongst all of these games that are coming up. We will need the whole squad to be able to progress in every single one of these games.
That’s the competitive nature of the competitions we’re in, and that's what you want in your squad - fighting to get as many minutes on the pitch as possible.
It’s really difficult for any one player to complete five games in such a short period, that's tough going. So we do need the squad and we do need people to step up.
We want to rectify things from the Chelsea game
I think we're all disappointed with the nature of how we conceded the goals [in Sunday's 5-0 WSL defeat by Chelsea], and the volume of goals obviously is not good enough from our part. There's things that we can rectify from that game going into the next game for sure. We have to be better, and that's the expectation.
I think before Christmas we'd got some real consistency in performances and we were picking up points and doing really well. We looked out of sorts at the weekend compared to what we were before Christmas, and that's probably been due to quite a longer break and a game [against Liverpool in the Women's FA Cup fourth round] being postponed. Now we've had that experience [in the Chelsea game], we've got to make sure we learn from that and move forward.
