West Ham United first-team coach Paul Nevin felt Saturday’s game at Lens will act as a perfect warm-up for next weekend’s Premier League big kick-off.
The Hammers drew 0-0 with the French Ligue 1 side, as the pair played out a tightly-contested affair at the sold-out Stade Bollaert-Delelis.
Jarrod Bowen struck the bar late on for the visitors, matching the earlier feat of the hosts’ Seko Fofana – and much like that, neither side could be separated as we took another step forward ahead of facing Manchester City at London Stadium a week on Sunday.
For Nevin, he believes the team is growing week-on-week and will be well-set for the visit of the Citizens.
We were looking for elements we worked on this week to be reproduced in a really highly-competitive game today.
We probably felt in the first half we had a lot of giveaways on the ball unnecessarily. We couldn’t really retain it as well as we wanted to, but I think you saw in the second half we made a few adjustments to our shape and got much more dominant in the game, and that gave us the biggest chance right at the end.
The key was [dealing with] a really good rotation, and we’d seen that in the research we’d done. It’s trying to get grips to that and sometimes in a game it takes a few minutes to do that – who’s moving where and from what position.
Once we did get to grips with it and our wing backs got into it, we started to turn the game around.
The atmosphere was like a league game and it was impressive.
We were here 90 minutes before the game and it was already half-full so we knew what we had to prepare for.
It’s a huge week building [into the opening game] so I think it’s the perfect scenario to enter the Premier League games with a test like this.
The pre-season has gone well. We’ve got an incredibly hard-working group and we’ve hit a lot of the markers we had.
Nayef Aguerd picked up an unfortunate injury, but you’ve seen the versatility that w have in some players playing slightly out of position today for the team.
Hopefully we’ll get some players back for this week’s training and be stronger as we head into the league game against Manchester City.
Dec is fantastic in any position, and we used him at centre-back towards the end because Craig Dawson was coming back from a minor knock.
We had it in our head that we didn’t want him to play the full 90 minutes and Dec was the obvious choice for us to go back so we could maintain that shape.
The character of the team is really important.
There are a lot of players out there with talent but it’s the right mentality you need as well and with Gianluca Scamacca we did our research and he’s shown both sides of that.
The work he’s done this week has been fantastic and we kept him at Rush Green to continue his pre-season while we had this game, in light of trying to prepare him as quickly as we can.
The manager is always looking to improve the team.
We did amazing things last season, but if you stand still you fall behind. Again, it’s part of the work we’re doing that we’re looking to continually improve the squad.
