Billy McKinlay viewed Saturday’s pre-season draw with Luton Town as a step forward as West Ham United build towards the start of the new campaign.
The Hammers looked set to claim a victory against their EFL Championship opponents, taking the lead through Tomáš Souček’s first half header and holding that advantage right through to second half stoppage time.
Sonny Bradley grabbed a last-gasp leveller for his side to ensure the game would end locked at 1-1, and although first team coach McKinlay admitted a disappointment at not seeing out the win, he felt the performance was an improvement on the pre-season games to date.
It’s another valuable 90 minutes in the bank.
It was a tough game, another good workout in what has been a really tough week for us, physically.
We’re slightly disappointed we didn’t win the game, which we always want to do, but I thought the performance was improving, certainly in the middle part of the game.
We ran out of legs a little bit in the end and missed a couple of chances which would have put the game to bed, but we’re improving. There’s work to do and we understand that.
Today was a step forwards towards the start of the season.
The players who came back from international duty are getting more game time and more minutes.
They need that, but we have to be careful with them to some degree.
For the physical aspect it’s been a tough week, which is what we need. They get it in their legs and then we start to fine-tune the performance.
There’s plenty of work to do on that, we need to improve in all aspects, particularly our attacking play and the quality of our play in the final third.
We’ll really be concentrating on that – we’ve got two weeks and hopefully we’ll be ready.
It was a brilliant goal from Tomáš today.
It was a nice piece of play, a terrific cross and header from Tomáš which has been his trademark for the past couple of seasons.
He missed a bit of training this past week due to a slight foot injury, so getting him up to speed again with 75 or 80 minutes today was good.
He scored a goal, as he did on Tuesday, and he’s a big player for us. There’s a little bit to do on his fitness but it’s nice to see him on the scoresheet.
We have a week on the training pitch ahead of Lens now.
We need the games, of course, but the games also have an impact on the training pitch and your ability to do certain things.
We’ve had a busy week on that aspect, now we have a few extra days training so we can start to fine-tune certain pieces that we need to improve on.
We look forward to seeing a continued improvement next week and pushing on towards Manchester City.
