David Moyes praised Mohammed Kudus after the Ghanaian marked his full West Ham United debut with a match-winning performance in Thursday’s UEFA Europa League Group A tie with FK TSC Bačka Topola at London Stadium.
The Irons fell behind to a sloppily conceded goal shortly after half-time, having dominated the opening 35 minutes without finding a way through the Serbs’ massed defensive ranks.
However, Petar Stanić’s goal sparked the Hammers into life and Kudus forced Nemanja Petrović to put through his own net – he later claimed the goal himself – before heading in James Ward-Prowse’s corner to put Moyes’ men in front.
Ward-Prowse added another assist when his corner was powered in by substitute Tomáš Souček, getting the UEFA Europa Conference League champions’ third consecutive European campaign off to a winning start – albeit in slightly uncomfortable circumstances on a stormy night in east London.
With a trip to fellow Europa League qualifiers Liverpool in the Premier League up next on Sunday, and a trip to fellow victors SC Freiburg – the Germans edging AEK Athens 3-2 in Greece – Moyes knows his team will need to be more clinical if they are to maintain their winning form of late and extend their unbeaten run of 16 European matches.
We should have made the game much easier with the score and the way it went, but ultimately we won the game.
We’ve got quite a good record in Europe with the games and it’s been quite a while since we lost so that’s another one to add to the victories.
I thought we played quite well with the ball at times, especially in the opening 20 or 30 minutes, but we didn’t really threaten enough or create enough opportunities.
We had one or two and if we’d scored early on it might have changed the game, but unfortunately it took for us to give away a goal and for us to come behind to get the victory.
We did something quite similar against Manchester City, when we got off to a good start and tried to hold on, but couldn’t quite do so, and they were a bit the same.
We gave away a really, really poor goal which meant we had to chase the game and we did and we found a way in the end.
We hadn’t created enough chances, to be honest, but in the end we got three goals and we’ve been scoring goals in recent weeks. In truth, we should have scored a whole lot more.
Every game you add on to the unbeaten European record, you can say you are going up a notch, but I’m looking for performances as well.
I remember the Conference League last year and we didn’t perform well in the opening games. We won a lot of games, but if you’d asked if I was really pleased with the performances I’d have said I wasn’t.
Tonight, there were bits of it and we thought we would get a lot more possession. How good were we with it? Sometimes we were good and sometimes we weren’t so good, so it’s something we have to keep working on and improving.
I’m pleased for both Mo and Dinos.
I thought Mo started the game really well and the team was playing well in the opening 20 minutes. He faded away, but in the end he came up with one and maybe two goals, I’m being told, so I’m really, really pleased for him.
He’s made a good start, we like him a lot and we’ll edge him in when we get the opportunities in the right moments to do so. I’m pleased because we needed someone to come up with goals tonight and he was the one who did it.
Let’s be fair, we should have scored three more from James’s corner kicks tonight, but we missed a couple and didn’t quite get it.
But, look, if we can have that and we have got people who can score headers and want to head the ball in the box, it will give us a great chance of scoring.
That’s the way it works now and Thursday-Sunday football has never been easy, but we’re getting used to it now, as we’ve had it three years in a row.
We’ve got a really difficult game up at Liverpool next, but hopefully we’ll be ready for it.
