West Ham United boss Skinner highlights importance of togetherness ahead of Manchester City test | OneFootball

West Ham United manager Rehanne Skinner says that her side need collective resilience when they travel to Manchester City.

The Hammers face The Cityzens at The Joie Stadium on Sunday afternoon. West Ham United go into the match as huge underdogs.

When speaking in the pre-match press conference, West Ham United manager Skinner said that her side are working hard to improve their defensive resilience and that it requires a strong collective effort from every player on the pitch wearing claret and blue.

“Defensively, we need to keep working towards being harder to break down, being more compact and putting ourselves into a position where we can have more impact as a team and not being isolated,” Skinner said. “When you get that right, you can be much harder to beat and make life difficult for teams with the attacking quality that we know Manchester City have got.

“Naturally, you can’t get all of that right at the same time but we want to make sure that we do it as a collective. It essentially gives us the opportunity to be more effective as one versus individually. If you get that right, you can make life really difficult for teams like City but you have to stay concentrated and alert all of the time because we know that one opportunity might be all that it takes.

“Equally, at the other end, we want to keep building on how effective we are in-front of goal. We know we can cause problems, we just haven’t done that as much as we would have liked and we just have to keep working on that.”

West Ham United were three goals down after just 24 minutes on their last visit to The Joie Stadium. The Hammers eventually lost that game 5-0. Skinner said that lessons will be learnt from that fixture and that her side have to stick to their game plan from the first whistle to the last.

She said “The team has changed so much between last year and this year but ultimately, we have got to learn from the things that led to that last year.

“We had a couple of trips to the North West, Manchester United as well, where the first half, we didn’t deliver the game plan that we set out to do and we ended up getting ourselves in a bit of a mess because of it. The second half was very different in both of those games but the damage was done at that point.

“We have to be able to start these games all of the time with the mindset that is what we are trying to do. The tougher the opposition, the harder it is for you to do what you’re trying to do but ultimately, the second we start changing and individuals are trying to do things differently to what the team is trying to do, it causes a lot of problems against teams like that.

“The first half of that game and the game against United last year were exactly the same. It’s something that the team have spoken about and collectively, we have tried to work on that over pre-season. In the past, we are thinking about them more than we are thinking about us and you can’t do that because you can’t control what they’re going to do. You just have to do what you can do and take the game to them in a way that you know you can do.”

West Ham United’s Barclays Women’s Super League fixture at Manchester City kicks-off at 1pm on Sunday afternoon.