McKinlay: Hammers will work hard for Bournemouth trip

The Hammers ended their pre-season campaign with a chastening 4-0 defeat against Bayer Leverkusen in Germany.

But McKinlay says they will be working hard on the training ground to ensure they are fully prepared for the trip to the Vitality Stadium on Saturday.

“There have been some good things in pre-season and obviously today showed up some things we need to improve on a little bit,” he told whufc.com.

“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 and then we’ll be back working hard to get ourselves ready for Bournemouth.”

Jonas Hoffman fired the hosts in front with a free-kick, before Victor Boniface finished off a good move with a close-range finish.

Nigerian Boniface fired a third past Lukasz Fabianski before the break, with Tomas Soucek and Said Benrahma hitting the woodwork either of the break in reply.

A Robert Andrich penalty completed the scoring and McKinlay added: “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.”

McKinlay revealed how problems with their travel arrangements did not help, but tried to find positives from the first appearances of Michail Antonio and Ben Johnson after international duty in the summer.

“Our plane was cancelled [on Friday] and that meant we had a really early start [on Saturday morning],” he said.

“The boys were up at five 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 and Ben out on the pitch for their first minutes. 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’ve now got a good week to get ourselves prepared for Bournemouth. Plenty to do, but we’ll be ready.”