Talking Points | Skinner on boost in confidence, pushing up the levels and tough Brighton test | West Ham United F.C.

We’re looking forward to playing at the Amex in front of our travelling fans

The biggest thing is, we want to make sure we play in the best stadiums that we can. The players love it, they really enjoy going into those settings. Our West Ham fans have been superb, they’ve been all over the country with us already and we’ve had some long journeys.

I’ve got no doubt we’ll have a good following this weekend. We bring a lot of noise anyway, so I think that will help us, but other than that, we’re there to focus on the football and make sure we do the best job we can to get the points.

 

Goal difference plays a part as the season progresses

Goal difference definitely plays a part. Forwards are always the most expensive players and that’s just the nature of it. Goal-scoring is tough, it’s a lot of pressure all the time, it involves a lot of creativity, a lot of confidence. When you get into a roll with it, you see people getting lots of goals in a sequence and that’s where we’re building to.

We’ve got good quality within the team and we want to utilise that, but we’ve maybe not had the right relationships to exploit that as much as we could have done. In the last two games, we’ve seen our capabilities of getting in and around the box, which we’ve worked really hard on.

Vivi’s goal at the weekend was really positive, we’ve scored from set plays, when you start to chip away at both of those elements, you can get more goals. If we keep working on the defensive stuff to keep clean sheets, like the one at the weekend, then the goal difference does play a part as time goes on.

 

Our attackers are building good relationships

We want to try and get Vivi in those goal-scoring positions, like we did against Leicester, as much as possible.

With the work that Riko does, alongside Paví and Seraina Piubel, and other payers like Oona Siren, Dagný Brynjarsdóttir and Emma Harries, there’s loads of different options we have to be able to go into that attacking line-up.

Vivi did a good job at the weekend and her link-up with Paví will help, they both speak Spanish.
Collectively, the more we work on their relationships, the more opportunities we’ll get and that will be the key thing for the forwards.