David Moyes had plenty to smile about when he faced the media for his pre-Crystal Palace press conference on Friday afternoon.
After watching his team take their place in the UEFA Europa League draw in the morning, he led the team through their final training session ahead of Saturday’s London Stadium derby against the Eagles.
The Hammers sit top of the table having won both their opening Premier League games of the season, scoring eight goals in the process, and the manager says the challenge for his team now is to stay there as long as they can.
Here’s everything he had to say ahead of the game.
We’re in a good place at the moment and we need to keep it up…
I’ve been really pleased with the results and the performances have been good too. There’s been a lot of good things to like in both games. We did a lot of good things at Newcastle and I thought we played well against Leicester.
Leicester are an excellent team and they proved that last season. Overall I’m really pleased – I’m pleased that we’ve scored the goals, but I want us to win the games and if we can do it with a bit of style, that’s great.
The plan is to try and keep winning and have that level of consistency. I think last year we had the best consistency we’ve had for a long time at this Club. We became really strong just after January, February and had a really consistent run which I think was shown by the league table of clubs in 2021 – we’re up there with Manchester City and some other clubs, which shows you just how well we’ve done. We’ve started this season well too and the challenge is to keep that going as long as we can.
It was exciting to watch the Europa League draw today…
We’re really excited. We watched the draw this morning and watching the teams come out of the pots the biggest thrill was seeing West Ham in one of the pots, back in Europe and getting supporters back at the games hopefully as well.
Hopefully we can get them to the away games as well as being at London Stadium, and for us it’s a great opportunity. The players earned it with their performances last year – they played so well throughout the season and, rightly so, they’ve merited a place in European competition.
The support was superb the other night and I can’t wait to see another 60,000 crowd on Saturday…
The support was magnificent. We gave them something to shout about and it was a terrific team performance, which helped as well, but the crowd didn’t half get behind us.
The way the goals were celebrated was great, and there’s been a couple of changes at the stadium too. They’ve brought the ends in behind the goals, which has helped too and brought them closer to the pitch in some areas.
I hope the way the team is playing has given the supporters something to enjoy and made them look forward to coming to the stadium and I hope we can keep it up.
Crystal Palace will provide us with a tough test…
It’s a game that we’ll treat the same as all the others. Patrick Vieira was an unbelievable player and he’s had a good managerial background too. He’s learned from different situations as part of the Man City group, then he managed in France and is now back in the Premier League. [He might be] learning his trade in the Premier League as a manager but he certainly knows his way around it as a footballer, and knows how good teams look. So we’re expecting a really tough game.
Crystal Palace had a really tough game first up against Chelsea, and then they’ve drawn against Brentford, but Brentford will be a good team in their own right and will be a hard team to play against for different reasons.
I think Crystal Palace are finding their feet. They’ve had quite a few changes [in the playing squad] as well, which can take time to settle in, so I hope it’s a good time to play them, but you never know in football.
