Manchester United head coach Marc Skinner says that his side must be prepared to take on a ‘street smart’ Reading team.
The Red Devils go into this evening’s opening Barclays FA Women’s Super League match at The Leigh Sports Village heavily fancied to get the three points but Skinner has told his team not to take anything for granted against a Reading side aiming for the top half of the table this season.
When speaking in his pre-match press conference in which FAWSL Full-Time were present, Skinner said “Reading can achieve what they set out to achieve, our focus is not on Reading just because we play against them. They are so street smart, you have to focus for the full game when you face Reading.
“When we played them at Birmingham, I think we were always on the side where it was so, so difficult in terms of it was always so, so close. For us, it is no different, even if we are seen as the favourite because we are Manchester United. Reading will use that so we have to be prepared for them to use that.
“That’s where our energy comes in because I won’t allow my team to think that they are the best team, they are going to earn the right to be the best team, that’s what we want from our teams, you have to grow to be that stature without forgetting that you are in against an opponent.
“If you want to be that better team you have to work them first and foremost and be creative on and off the ball because they’ll throw problems at us. We have to be ready to fix them, sometimes on the fly, because they are adaptive. We have to stay live, you can’t just coach patterns and beams and all of a sudden it’s ready.
“Reading will always achieve lots. I don’t want to call them a banana skin because that suggests that they only have the qualities to upset somebody. Actually, they’ve got lots and lots of qualities.
“Our focus is on how we attack Reading and how we can defend and that’s why our focus is on them and only on them at this moment.”
Reading were surprise 2-0 winners in last season’s meeting at The Leigh Sports Village back in February. Skinner was coaching at Orlando Pride when the result was recorded, however, he admits that he has analysed that game in detail since taking up his new role at Manchester United.
He said “I’ve watched the games from last year, I’ve seen and tried to adapt how we want to play against them and we have tried to go into as much depth as we possibly can without knowing exactly what they are going to do.
“There is no doubt that there will be directness in their play, they have the ability to mix very good football with directness and I think that we have to be prepared for both. We have to be able to know that they are going to be able to rotate between the lines of our system so we have to know that we have to pick up the uglier side of the game too, where we have got to be in the spaces that they want to arrive in, we’ve got to shut them down quickly and then really maximise what they give us when we have the ball.
“If we don’t do our job off the ball, we won’t have the time and quality to do it on the ball so we have to be prepared for that. We have watched a lot of what they do and we have also got to prepare the players to think and not just act on the moment. Once we show them, we can discuss ways that we can add that to our game.”
The Barclays FA Women’s Super League fixture between Manchester United and Reading kicks-off at 7.45pm this evening and will be broadcast live on Sky Sports Main Event and on Sky Sports Premier League. Fans can buy tickets to attend the match right up to kick-off with tickets being issued in digital format only.
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