David Moyes felt circumstances worked against his West Ham United team in Sunday’s 3-3 Premier League draw with Arsenal.
The Hammers played some outstanding football to roar into a three-goal lead inside 35 minutes, with Jesse Lingard, Jarrod Bowen and Tomas Soucek all netting, before scoring two own-goals either side of half-time to give the Gunners a sniff at grabbing an unlikely draw, which they did when Alexandre Lacazette headed in an equaliser eight minutes from the end.
West Ham went close to scoring a fourth, most notably when Michail Antonio hit the post from a yard out at 3-2, while number of decisions by the match officials left Moyes and his players seemingly feeling a sense of frustration.
Speaking to West Ham TV, the manager was disappointed to see his side relinquish a winning position but was still eager to take the positives from their performance in the opening half-hour and their overall position, which remains fifth in the Premier League table.
It was tough but look, we came back from 3-0 earlier in the season and it’s never nice when it happens, but I thought we were a little bit unlucky.
We got a little bit sloppy after we’d played ever so well for the first 30 minutes which resulted them getting a goal just before half-time which, when you see it, was going wide before it hit Tomas and goes in so that was hard to take.
Nevertheless, we had a good lead going in at half-time but the minute we lost that second goal we were feeling under pressure, but we also had some really good chances to go on and win the game ourselves.
We want that opening period to be the future and we want to play like that all the time, but we did it for 30-odd minutes and it’s got to be for longer.
We need to be able to play as well as that for longer periods, but look, it’s great that we’re actually saying that we’re disappointed we’ve drawn with Arsenal.
It was a tough day for us with the officiating but we can’t in any way blame that for our performance or the result.
Sometimes you just need the break of the ball or a few things to go your way and I would say we got none today.
We’re nudging along and we’re trying to hang in there with the top teams.
We’re trying to be competitive right until the end of the season and we know we’re in a difficult run of fixtures.
They’re all difficult, but we’ll have some fixtures near the end of the season which we might think we have a good chance in, and we had a really good chance today.
You can’t deny Arsenal just beat Tottenham and they just got through to the quarter-finals of the Europa League, so they’re on a bit of a run at the moment and it was important to halt them so they couldn’t get any closer to us, so hopefully we can keep well in front of them.
We hope the players will come back refreshed after the international week.
It gives us a chance to give them a bit of a break and a couple of days off. We’ll have those who aren’t going away to internationals working and we wish our international boys well.
The biggest thing is they come back from international duty injury-free, as that’s really the key for us as the international boys are so important to us.
We hope they’ll come back and be ready to play for us again in a couple of weeks’ time.
