Opening day defeat a motivation for West Ham United says Skinner | OneFootball

West Ham United manager Rehanne Skinner says that her side’s opening day defeat to Tottenham Hotspur can act as fuel to perform well against Arsenal this weekend.

The Hammers went down 1-0 to Spurs in Leyton last weekend. There was little to separate the two sides and West Ham United should have arguably come away with a positive result.

When speaking to the media ahead of this weekend’s fixture against Arsenal, West Ham United boss Skinner said that the defeat can be used to help motivate her players.

“When you know that you shouldn’t have lost a game, it’s always a motivation for players at this level; it’s what gets them out of bed to fix things and get them right the next time around,” Skinner said. “Whenever you’ve been outplayed, you hold your hands up and accept that and that’s a different mentality.

“Ultimately, we have to be consistent every week, so that we do get over the line with those moments. We had moments to win the game or at least get ourselves in-front [against Spurs] and we didn’t take those. Those are the bits that you make sure the players are learning from and we put right because you can only control those moments when you’re in them. You can’t look back and think ‘if we’d done X, Y or Z’, you have to deliver in the moment. That then makes players more focused on making sure they’re delivering that all of the time and that’s the bit we have to do in this league to win games.”

Arsenal opened their league campaign with a 4-1 defeat of London City Lionesses. Skinner says that her side must be switched on to deal with multiple attacking threats.

She said “You’re always expecting a team that has a lot of different attacking threats, lots of different movements going on that test your concentration and organisation. They did that [against London City Lionesses] and the longer the game went on, the more that became obvious. They’ve got plenty of players that can put the ball in the back of the net as well.

“It’s something that you’ve always got to be prepared for; threats coming from all different kinds of places, so we will work diligently to minimise that. We want to reduce the options that they have and for us, it’ll be a lot about what we do with the ball when we have it. It’s about how we can control the parts of the game when we have the ball and having confidence on the ball.”

West Ham United have the novelty of facing Arsenal on a Friday night under the Chigwell Construction Stadium floodlights. Skinner says that the occasion will be special but the focus doesn’t change a bit.

She said “I think players really enjoy playing under the lights on an evening. Whilst we’ve not done it on a weekend before, we’ve done it for League Cup games. It’s another opportunity to see if it attracts the crowd, the fans, that side of the game.

“We are more than happy to try it out and see how it works from a broadcast perspective but for us, it’s another game that we want to play. We want to try and get as many points out of every game as we can.”

West Ham United’s Barclays Women’s Super League fixture against Arsenal kicks-off at 7.30pm on Friday evening. Tickets are on-sale and can be purchased by clicking here.