Paul Konchesky says that consistency will be key for West Ham United Women between now and the end of the 2022/23 Barclays Women’s Super League season.
The Hammers return to action against Manchester City on Sunday after the conclusion of the final international break of the campaign, which saw eleven players represent their respective countries.
Konchesky admits the game at the Academy Stadium, which is being shown live on Sky Sports Football and Main Event, will be a tough one. Gareth Taylor’s side currently sits in fourth position in the WSL standings and are battling it out with Arsenal and Chelsea for a UEFA Champions League place.
And while the Hammers come into the match still searching for their first WSL victory of 2023, they know what it takes to find a win against Sunday’s opponents on their own patch, having beaten City 2-0 on their last visit back in October 2021.
The most recent meeting between the two teams came in January when a Bunny Shaw goal was the difference at Chigwell Construction Stadium.
Speaking in his pre-match press conference ahead of the trip to Manchester, the manager is hoping that his team can show some of the character and quality they produced in the reverse fixture earlier this season.
Manchester City are a great team so we know how tough the game will be.
I have always said with my team that on the day we can compete with anyone and I think we did prove that when we played them here in London. Maybe we switched off for five minutes and that’s when they punished us, and that’s what they’re good at.
We have to be on it and at it from minute one to when the full-time whistle sounds, if we do and we compete we can give them a good game.
We want to pick up points on the road, we’ve got a couple of tough away fixtures to end the season, but they’re games where we have a good opportunity to pick up points.
We’ve been in a lot of games recently where it could have gone either way.
At Reading away and Villa at home, we obviously didn’t pick up points, but we were so close, on maybe another day we would have picked up six. It’s been tough since the new year, but we keep showing we are in every game, we keep fighting.
We’ve spoken as a group about being more consistent, more ruthless in both boxes. When we attack we need to take our chances, but we need to be ruthless in our own box when we’re defending as well and keep them out of our goal.
We picked up a point in our last game which was good for us. We just need to keep building and picking up as many points as we can from now until the end of the season - there are 15 points to play for and we need to pick up as many as we can.
We have almost all of our players available for the trip to Manchester.
Other than Jess Ziu, who has been out for a very long time with her ACL injury, I’ve got a fully fit squad. I think Abbey-Leigh Stringer was the only other player that wasn’t available for the game against Liverpool, whilst Amber Tysiak has also been making really good progress with her injury.
It’s good for the manager to have everyone, but obviously it’s difficult as well to pick a team that we think can go and do the job at Man City.
I think that our season has been good overall.
Could it have been better? For certain. We could have probably had more points on the board, but I think if you look overall: we made a semi-final, and up until Christmas we had the most points at that stage that this football club has ever had!
We’ve taken points off of teams that we haven’t done before, and we’ve had a record crowd down at Dagenham. As the manager, I obviously want us to finish as high up the table as we can and pick up more points.
