Why West Ham Women’s historic run must be protected

I said in my last article that if we could end the season on a high, I will go into next season with such a belief that we could achieve something. So far, we are doing exactly that because when we play, we look like a team and we have so much added quality in our play now that we always look like scoring.

My only concern is if we do what we do at the end of most seasons and let a lot of our players leave and have to do another team revamp, it’ll just knock everything we have built up through the season.

The Martinez Impact and Attacking Fluidity

Since Shekira Martinez has been starting games, she has scored five goals and got goal assists. As well as Martinez, we have such a good understanding between our attackers in the final third, these players include Katrina Gorry, Vivianne Asseyi and Riko Ueki. By being able to rely on many of our players turning up in the final third, it has made us less predictable as a team and allowed us to put many more goals on our scoresheet.

Giant Killers: Breaking Records in March

We got points against Man City at home, Chelsea away and Tottenham at home all in March. These are results I haven’t seen us do for many seasons, we always had a tendency to turn up in a couple of big games but not like this and not all in three weeks. We are also the first team this season to gain any points off Chelsea at Kingsmeadow.

The Final Push: Palace, Villa, and Leicester

We still have a few WSL games left to play, away at Crystal Palace, home to Aston Villa and to end our season, we are at the King Power as we face Leicester City. With the way we are playing, I can honestly see us getting six and maybe even seven points in our next games. If we can end the season with two wins, I have to say that will be our best end to the season we’ve had.

It will feel slightly gutting though that we couldn’t have started better as we could have given ourselves a European chance, but it’d definitely be an end of the season I am proud of.

Looking Toward Next Season

My main hope is that we don’t lose any of our big players this summer and I can go into next season really believing we are creating something special. We have built such a good foundation and if we can add maybe one or two quality players to this squad, I can see us really going far next year.

But it will feel a lot of waste if we let a couple of our big players leave this summer. There are no talks of Asseyi, Gorry or Ueki leaving and hopefully that stays that way.