Billy McKinlay says his West Ham United team will be back on the training ground hard at work in the week ahead to finish their preparations for the new Premier League campaign.
The Hammers fell to a disappointing 4-0 loss to Bayer Leverkusen on Saturday as Jonas Hoffman's free-kick early on was quickly followed a double for Victor Boniface. The Nigerian's smartly-taken effort at the end of the first half gave the Irons a mountain to climb.
While Tomáš Souček and Saïd Benrahma went close to grabbing goals to pull the Hammers back into the game - both midfielders striking the woodwork either side of half-time - Leverkusen put the contest to bed on 70 minutes through Robert Andrich's penalty.
It meant West Ham ended pre-season with three wins from their six outings and assistant coach McKinlay is sure another week of graft will set them up for the opener at Bournemouth.
It wasn’t what we were looking for in the last game going into the Premier League.
We didn’t play well enough in all aspects of the game. We started slowly, gave away a poor goal initially and didn’t really recover from that.
It was a tough day against a top German team.
Our plane was cancelled yesterday and that meant we had a really early start this morning.
The boys were up a 5 o’clock and up travelling straight to the game pretty much.
There’s nothing we could do about it – circumstances out of our control. It maybe played a part in the start of the game, which we didn’t recover from, but we’ve got plenty of other things to work on as well.
It was good to get Micky Antonio and Ben Johnson out on the pitch for their first minutes today.
They’ve had a week’s training and didn’t miss too much [since their tournaments ended].
Paquetá got another 45 minutes too – we took him off at half-time as he took a little knock and it’s not the time to take chances with anybody.
We think he’ll be fine and ready to train on Monday.
It’s good to get them back and we’ve now got a good week to get ourselves prepared for Bournemouth. Plenty to do, but we’ll be ready.
There have been some good things in pre-season and obviously today showed up some things we need to improve on a little bit.
We’ve had some good results in pre-season but It has been mixed. It’s difficult with the players coming back sporadically at different times, but that’s part of it.
Plenty of work to do and we won’t become too down in terms of the result today. We’ll get ourselves ready for next week.
When you don’t play so well and get a result like we did today, the best thing to do is to get back on the grass.
We’ll recover on Sunday and then we’ll be back working hard to get ourselves ready for Bournemouth.
