2023 has been a landmark year for West Ham United and manager David Moyes was thrilled to close it with another result to remember.
Six months on from that glorious night in Prague, when the Irons ended their 43-year wait for silverware, they head into 2024 sixth in the table, holding their record points tally at the halfway stage of a Premier League campaign.
That came courtesy of a thrilling 2-0 win at Arsenal, secured by goals either side of the break from Tomáš Souček and Dinos Mavropanos, and a wonderfully resilient defensive display, led by the imperious Angelo Ogbonna, who deputised for Kurt Zouma in central defence.
Victory in north London was the Irons’ third league success in a row, and closed a month which has seen successes against top-six staples Tottenham Hotspur, Manchester United and now the Gunners.
Plenty to whet the appetite as we head into 2024...
What about 2023 for us as a Club? It’s been fantastic.
And thankfully we’ve finished it off in great fashion today.
We’ve lost a couple of games conceding five in recent weeks, which I’ve hated. I try not to get my teams to do that, but tonight we’ve defended really well.
We had two different centre-halves tonight, we lost Paquetá [during the first half], after he picked up an injury in the warm-up.
So there were lots of things going against us, but I have to say it was a brilliant resolute performance. They did everything together, they worked so hard together and we could have even got another right at the end there from the penalty.
Angelo and Dinos were fantastic, along with the others I have to say.
We have to play 50 or 60 games every year and we can’t play every game the same way. Tonight we had to find a way of stopping Arsenal, who could end up being the league champions.
So we did a job. We’ve just beaten Manchester United, we’ve just beaten Arsenal. They are great results for us and I’m thrilled with them.
I’m thrilled that we keep moving up and keep close to the top.
It’s a brilliant start for us [to have the Club’s highest points tally at the halfway point of the season] and it’s another win.
I just keep looking at the wins and it’s great that we can do that. We keep going and we want to build on it.
Unfortunately we’re probably going to lose Mo [Kudus] to the Africa Cup of Nations, so we’re going to need other players to step up. This is where we need to see players coming in, stepping up and keeping us going in that direction, because we’re going to need them badly.
When I came back four years ago the job was to make sure we didn’t get relegated.
I’m still thrilled that I didn’t get the team relegated, and now you think, ‘Well, what have we done in the last three years or so?’
And I think we’ve made great strides. Look, we probably don’t have the finances that lots of other clubs have got, where they can buy at the top end.
We have to try to make the most of it and I think we’ve done a really good job. The new signings have come in, we had to sell Declan and we keep evolving and trying to get better.
I think we do, I think we’re beginning to show some really good signs of how quickly we can counter-attack again.
We’re showing brilliant signs of how we can defend and we’ve got two or three stunningly good players who are making the difference in a lot of games.
