David Moyes was honest in his assessment of West Ham United's performance in their 5-0 defeat at Fulham on Sunday, saying his team fell well short of the required standard.
The Irons failed to build on their magnificent midweek win at Tottenham Hotspur, falling 3-0 down to the Cottagers before the break as Raúl Jiménez, Willian and Tosin Adarabioyo all hit the back of the net.
It got worse in the second half as Harry Wilson and Carlos Vinícius stepped off the bench to add to West Ham's woes and leave the boss apologetic for a sub-par display in west London.
I’m embarrassed for the result and the performance, and we’re sorry to the supporters for it.
There were a wee bit of mitigating circumstances – I think the midweek took a huge amount out of us. Playing Thursday and Sunday in two Premier League games, compared to [Fulham playing on] Wednesday and Sunday makes a big, big difference.
We’ve had quite a bit of illness in the camp over the last few days and that’s not helped.
We allowed them to grow into the game after we started it quite well.
I thought the first goal was a terrible goal from our point of view. We never squeezed up from the cross, which meant Jiménez could head it from eight or nine yards, rather than 14 or 15 yards.
The ball might have gone through and out [had we done so]. We just didn’t step up at all and from there things went from bad to worse. Things just turned against us really.
I’m hugely disappointed with the manner of it.
Even at half-time, I said 'we’re not going to concede any more goals, if we’re going to lose we’re not going to lose by any more'.
But what we’ve done in the end is that we did. There were bits of the second half where we got a wee bit closer to them and there were a couple of half-chances, and ultimately we conceded another couple of goals. It was really poor.
Fulham are a good team.
They’re scoring goals and we ran out of steam in the last couple of days. Even mentally, what it took out of us to get a result at Tottenham, I just felt today Edson pulled out because of illness, we had Pablo and Emerson who were both ill yesterday and we weren’t sure how they would be.
It’s nearly impossible to keep the players fresh [in this schedule], but it would be possible to put our midweek game on Wednesday.
It was on Thursday and I can’t do anything about that. I can only tell you it played a part. It wasn’t the reason we lost. We didn’t perform well enough and Fulham did.
The supporters were great and stuck with the team.
I think most of the supporters probably understood where we’d been in midweek, and we had two away games this week.
Everyone had two away games or two homes in this period and not many have taken six points.
Two away games, if you’d given me three points Id have probably said yes. If you’d given me two draws we’d have said that might have been good results away from home, so to get three points from the two games wasn’t that bad.
But more importantly it was a disappointment today in how we performed.
