West Ham boss delighted to win opening Conti Cup tie

The Hammers came from behind the beat the Women’s Championship side on Wednesday night, with second-half goals from Emma Harries and Izzy Atkinson cancelling out Carla Humphrey’s first-half strike.

The WSL side got their first win of the season last Sunday, beating Brighton & Hove Albion 2-0, and were looking to make it two wins on the bounce for their newly appointed manager.

However, you wouldn’t have thought that after watching the opening 30 minutes as West Ham struggled to get a hold on proceedings.

After being let off the hook with a brilliant reactionary save from debutant Megan Walsh following a smart shot from Friga Ayisi, West Ham practically handed Charlton the lead after failing to clear their lines.

An attempted switch from the backline was intercepted by Freya Godfrey on the right-hand side and the Arsenal loanee whipped a searching cross into the path of Humphreys who bundled the ball into the net giving the Championship side the advantage after 20 minutes.

Charlton might have doubled their lead 10 minutes later had it not been for another fine save from Walsh to deny Humphreys her second.

It took Skinner’s side a while, but they began to find their groove toward the end of the first half and a brilliantly worked short corner from West Ham, which was put agonizingly wide by captain Hawa Cissoko, was a sign of things to come.

The Hammers equalised after 58 minutes when another well-worked set-piece found its way across goal to Atkinson, who set the ball back to Harries to slot home her first goal for the club since signing from Reading.

And West Ham kept up their momentum to take the lead on after 77 minutes through Atkinson as the Republic of Ireland international was found free on the left wing and took a perfect touch past Beth Roe before finishing brilliantly at the keeper’s near post to score her first goal of the season.

The Hammers managed to hold onto their lead despite heavy late pressure from Charlton as they sought an equaliser which involved another great stop from Walsh in stoppage time to secure the points in Group E.

And Skinner said: “I’m delighted. I think the team is working really hard, we’ve obviously put a lot of effort in throughout the course of pre-season.

“We’re a bit disappointed with the first 20-25 minutes to be honest, but we then started to recognise the opportunities that we could take in terms of the ways that we’d be able to exploit Charlton.

“In the last 15 minutes before half-time, we created loads of chances because all of a sudden we started to move the ball in the way we knew would be more effective, but we were a bit too slow to do that at the start of the game.

“We made some mistakes and put ourselves under pressure at times, but game in game out, we’ll reduce those, and we’ll keep improving on the areas that we want to be better at.

“The most important thing for us is the process and how we keep working hard to improve on every performance and I think we’ve got to come away from this thinking we’re not really happy with the speed that we started.

“We need to fix that on Saturday (against Chelsea), and then we just need to take the bits of quality that we did today into the game.”

West Ham travel to Kingsmeadow to take on the reigning WSL champions Chelsea in their third league fixture of the season on Saturday (5.30pm).