David Moyes felt West Ham United did a lot of good things again in Saturday’s 2-1 Premier League defeat at Liverpool.
The Hammers took a first-half lead through Pablo Fornals and pushed the champions all the way at Anfield, only for a contentious Mohamed Salah penalty and Diogo Jota’s strike five minutes from full-time to leave them empty-handed.
Manager Moyes was frustrated by referee Kevin Friend’s decision to award the spot-kick just before half-time for Arthur Masuaku’s challenge on Salah, the build-up to Jota's winner and by his team’s inability to create the chances they created in between.
I’m disappointed that we’ve lost at Anfield, so that’s one thing, but I would be disappointed if I lost any game.
I thought tonight we looked as if we could have got something. Liverpool played well and had lot of the all, but I thought we did some really good things as well so there’s a lot of positives to take from it.
I’m amazed that a penalty kick for the action in the first half, I really am. I’m getting disappointed now, not with the decisions, but I’m getting more disappointed that we’re going to allow those sort of penalty kicks to be accepted. People may debate if it is or it isn’t, but in my book it just isn’t a penalty.
We did have some half-chances to score more goals and we weren’t quite clinical enough two or three times.
I have to say Liverpool were very good with the ball and we defended really well, but that’s what you expect.
We knew the game was going to be really tough and we’d need to be disciplined, but we missed a couple of really good opportunities to get another goal, but it’s a good sign that we’re playing some really good stuff.
I’ve had a quick look at it and I think we could have done a bit better with their winning goal.
We came up to Xherdan Shaqiri just a bit quick and I think he puts it through the centre-half’s (Fabian Balbuena) legs.
We saw them play a reverse ball like that in midweek against Midtjylland [in the Champions League] and they got a goal from it as well, so it was good play by Liverpool, but we should have done better with it from the defending side.
I think for Seb Haller’s first game back it was always going to be tough, coming here and not having a great deal of the ball.
I think Sebastien’s got something to offer us and he’s got a lot of good attributes and hopefully he will show them in the coming weeks and months to come.
We feel like we can play and challenge our opponents in all the games.
We’ll not win all of them like tonight’s, but I think we feel, going into them, that we’ve got a chance. We came here last year and were unlucky to lose 3-2.
I wouldn’t say we were unlucky tonight, but we just needed a couple of decisions to go for us, even if the VAR decision did go in our favour.
I’m just really disappointed with that decision for the penalty kick in the first half.
