David Moyes admitted his West Ham United team had not done the basics well enough in Sunday’s 4-1 Premier League defeat at Aston Villa.
Nothing was ever going to come easily at Villa Park, where Unai Emery’s team had won ten top-flight matches in a row prior to the Hammers’ visit, but the Londoners made their own task even more difficult with a succession of errors.
The Irons gave the ball away cheaply in the lead up to Villa’s first two goals, which were both scored by Douglas Luiz, before giving themselves hope through Jarrod Bowen’s deflected shot.
However, another loose touch enabled John McGinn to set Ollie Watkins away to make it 3-1, before substitute Leon Bailey turned his man before slamming in a late fourth.
The resilience which was West Ham’s hallmark in the opening four matches, when they won three and conceded just four goals, has been replaced by a frailty that has seen them concede 12 times in the five games since, losing three of them.
Moyes knows his team will have to perform better, both individually and collectively, if they are to arrest the recent slide down to ninth place and climb back up the table.
I’ve no doubt that Aston Villa had better quality in the big moments than we did and if you look at how they’ve been playing in the last six months or so, they’ve got that.
We’re still trying to build a team. We’ve started the season well and had lots of good things said about us but I know because I am the one who sees us every day that there are lots of things we need to do better.
Today was a game against a side who you maybe hope we’ll be competing with, but they looked like they were at a different level than we were today.
I’m most disappointed that we lost our being tough and hard to beat and play against and we let them score easy goals. That’s not what my teams do.
Our football is improving and some of our stuff is getting better, but we can’t then let that be part of it and not defend hard enough, well enough or compact enough to make it hard for the opposition to score.
I thought we did gift them goals, and certainly the second one was very disappointing with what we did there.
We were one-nil down at the time and we had done OK. Maybe we hadn’t played as well [as them] but in the first half we had great opportunities to make chances.
We’ve had that in games this season and taken those chances, like we did away to Brighton, when we’ve made the moments count. Today we had the chance to make those moments and we never made them.
We got the opportunities to pick out a good cross or find somebody in the box or find someone clean or pick someone out from a corner, but we didn’t do that.
If you look at their third goal, it was really unlucky.
They hit a diagonal pass and Mo just stretches his leg to either control it or stop it getting to where its destination was and it falls to John McGinn, who plays in Ollie Watkins.
It still shouldn’t have happened like that, but that’s how quick those games can change. That’s what happens. It was a really quick counter-attack and they got the goal and we’ve done that to other teams ourselves.
There was a period [after our goal] when we were better with the ball and a bit better going into the box and earned one or two corner kicks, but we weren’t quite clinical enough to make them count, really.
We had a couple of things kicked away or cleared off the line, but it wasn’t enough.
We have had a great start in all the competitions, in the Premier League, we got through in the League Cup and we started well in the group stages of the Europa League.
We’ve got a difficult game in midweek but let’s dust ourselves down from this one and get ourselves ready [for Olympiacos away].
The Premier League is always going to be our bread and butter and they are the ones we have to focus on, but if we can do what we’ve done in the last two years and go as far as we can in European competition, that’s our aim.
