West Ham United women’s head coach Matt Beard says there were many positives to take from their Continental Tyres Cup opener at Arsenal on Sunday.
The Gunners took the spoils thanks to a Katie McCabe double and Beth Mead’s header, but West Ham – in their first competitive outing since winning Women’s Super League status – gave the cup holders a real contest.
Brianna Visalli’s low drive on 48 minutes got the visitors back into it at 2-1 three minutes after the interval, and a couple of Leanne Kiernan crosses came close to bringing West Ham back level.
Arsenal’s experience told with a third goal towards the end, but Beard thought it was a performance that should give his team great encouragement for the season ahead.
He explained: “We can definitely take plenty of positives from the game, especially in the second half when we were able to make one or two tactical adjustments.
“It was only really what we’d worked on in training, but we just needed to be a little bit more positive, and I felt we came out in the second half and were excellent.
“We got the goal, could have got a couple of others, and when you consider this is just our seventh week together and our sixth game, I’m really pleased with where we are.
“This has given us a good benchmark now for us to know what we need to do and where we need to get to, playing against a good side like Arsenal.
“I don’t think we were a million miles away from them today. There were a few times in the first half where gave the ball away and I felt we defended the counter-attack quite well, and [being countered on] is something that hasn’t really happened to us in pre-season, but the positivity of the group has been fantastic from day one
“If you look at the first half, both goals were preventable and that’s something that we’ll look at, but Arsenal have got good players and they caused us problems with their movement, but I felt we dealt with that in the second half.
“We can take a lot of positives to make the team better and improve in the next performance."