David Moyes is hoping the experience of reaching last season’s UEFA Europa League semi-finals, and the disappointment of losing there, will serve as both a foundation and motivation for West Ham United to reach the UEFA Europa Conference League final this time around.
The Scot led the Hammers on a memorable run to the last-four of the Europa League a year ago, scoring landmark victories over Sevilla and Olympique Lyonnais, only for first-leg defeat at London Stadium and red cards in Germany to cost them defeat to Eintracht Frankfurt.
Twelve months on, Moyes and his squad have arrived in Belgium to take on KAA Gent in the Conference League quarter-finals. Speaking at Ghelamco Arena, the 59-year-old reflected on those unforgettable nights and stated his desire to give West Ham supporters similar experiences over the coming weeks and months, culminating in victory in the final in Prague on 7 June.
But at the same time, the experienced manager is not looking past Belgian Cup holders Gent, who have themselves put together a superb European season and are going well in their own domestic Pro League.
Here is what he had to say…
It’s great that we are here and we’re still in European competition.
For us it’s a big achievement and long may it continue. We want to keep it going, but every round and every game you play is very tough.
I’d love to give the supporters another couple of nights like we did last year, but truly I’d like to go further if we can.
I’ve got big respect for Gent, like I do for all the teams we play. We have no divine right to get through. We have to work very hard for it and we’ve got to play well. We’ve got a two-legged tie to get through so we have to do a really good job and see if we’re good enough to get to a semi-final.
I think every game, when you get to the knockout rounds, it gets really tough. Gent have had some big wins, an incredible win away in Istanbul, and they’re on a good run as well, so we know it’s going to be a tough game.
We’re aware of the team and we’ve been to Belgium a couple of times recently, once this season and once the season before. We don’t know everything about Gent but we certainly have done as much homework as we possibly can.
The big thing is for us to perform and continue to reach the standards which we have done in Europe this season. We’re ten unbeaten in this competition, it’s a really good record and we want to add to it if we can.
We were close last season and when we look back we need to learn from our mistakes [against Eintracht].
We made mistakes, me included. We were a goal down in the first leg before the game had even started. There’s things like that we need to learn, we need to learn to be adaptable whoever the referees are and we have to learn very quickly to find the tolerance levels, which can play a big difference in these sort of games in Europe.
We keep reminding the players and remembering things that happened, things we did well and not so well, in the hope we get most of it right.
I hope the experience we’ve got from our run last year will help.
We lost a goal early on in the game against Frankfurt, we had a sending-off, I got sent-off, we got caught up and we didn’t give ourselves a chance in lots of things.
We need to do things better on the pitch as well as how we play. hopefully we’ve learned.
I look at Pep [Guardiola], who’s won Champions Leagues but still is looking for better ways and learning all the time with his team to win finals as well The good thing is at West Ham we’re in this position again, which is really, really good. It gives us a chance and we have to try and take that chance if we can.
Emotions are something you never know how they’re going to take you and probably when you look back you can say why you understand the emotions were that way – we were right up against in on a couple of occasions.
But we’ve got to try and make sure we’re better disciplined, calmer, but we still want the players to be emotional, to understand what it means, to be motivated, eager to impress and show that.
We don’t want vanilla players who aren’t going to go around and challenge, tackle, run around and be competitive. We need players to be all of those things and we have to learn were we draw the line. Sometimes your judgement of the officials has to be taken as the game goes on.
It’s always good to have momentum if you can and we’ve not had great momentum this season.
Let’s be fair, in this competition we have. Our form since the World Cup has been of a much better level, so we’re beginning to build it and we want to keep it going.
This competition has given us some of our best results and performances, so I’m hoping we can add to that.
It would be much nicer if we had another seven or eight points [in the Premier League], but we don’t. We have a quarter-final of a European competition, which I’m thinking to myself, can we try to go further.
We talked about it and we had great nights in Europe when it got to these stages and I hope we can give the supporters a couple more.
We have to try and get the balance right, it’s not easy and that’s why Thursday-Sunday football is not an easy thing as we’ve always talked about. There will be other teams next year who probably have a similar situation.
For any manager, getting to a European final would be huge.
I felt last year when we got to the quarter-finals, I thought: ‘This is great’. We were up against really big teams; Sevilla in the round of 16, Lyon in the quarters. We had a run of difficult games and you could easily have gone out because those teams were much more versed in Europe than we were.
It makes us feel a bit this year that we have a bit more experience having been there before and done it, we’re beginning to have a feel for it.
We’ve got this game, but we’ve also got the game at London Stadium next Thursday, where we’ll have 60,000 fans behind us.
Everybody knows how important it is and everyone wants to be at the big games. For a manager you want to be involved in the big games and hopefully we’ve got a few more to come.
