It may have been a pre-season game played in challenging circumstances, but Head Coach Julen Lopetegui was making absolutely no excuses for his West Ham United team’s 3-1 Stateside Cup defeat by Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Saturday night’s game in Jacksonville, Florida, was delayed by over two hours by a storm which twice flooded the pitch at EverBank Stadium, while overhead thunder and lightning repeatedly sent supporters and players heading for safety and cover.
When the match did finally kick-off at 9.05pm local time, conditions were still hot and humid, but Lopetegui was not impressed by the way his players performed, regardless of the delay or the conditions, either in the air or under foot.
Instead, he demanded more from them individually and collectively, conscious that the start of the new Premier League season is only three weeks away.
However, the Spaniard did reserve praise for the patience of the West Ham supporters who had first travelled many miles to be in northeast Florida, then waited to see their heroes in action when for a long time it looked likely that the game would be called-off due to the inclement weather.
Unfortunately I suffered the same situation one previous preseason here in Florida, because it’s the time of storms here and of course it’s a big risk and it can happen a lot of times.
Unfortunately it happened today, but in the end we could play. We had to wait, but it was not only for us, but for Wolves too and in the end the most important thing was that we played 90 minutes more.
It was a big demand of course, and we are aware that we have to work very hard in the next three weeks to be ready for the start of the Premier League and OK, let’s see.
Today, Wolves were better and they deserved to win. We have to do a lot of things but despite the fact we have a lot of new players and a lot of Academy players, it is not an excuse.
I think that we have to improve in a lot of things with and without the ball, so we have a lot of work to do in front of us.
There were not a lot of good moments.
We have to do a lot better and a lot of much better things to win the matches, so that’s why I told the players the demands will be higher and we have to try to translate this in the next three weeks.
We have to analyse this match with calmness, but always knowing that sometimes this is not a bad thing that this happens in the pre-season, because I want us to know more about our needs, and for us to know we have to align and work together for the first match in the Premier League that is more or less in three weeks.
It is not an excuse because in football both teams have the same conditions, for us and for Wolves too, so we have to adapt.
Sometimes you play with these conditions and other times you play in minus-five, so it is all about football.
I think that the more important thing is to analyse what we have to improve with and without the ball and after to work very hard to achieve all these things and to be able to arrive in the first match against Aston Villa.
It was not the best conditions for the supporters because they suffered the rain too.
In the end they could see the match with a two-hour delay, but unfortunately we could not give them a victory.
We hope to change this for them in the next days.
