David Moyes is looking forward to a second consecutive European tour after his West Ham United side overcame Viborg FF to reach the UEFA Europa Conference League group stage.
The Hammers arrived in Denmark with a 3-1 first-leg advantage and extended that through Gianluca Scamacca’s smartly taken first-half finish. It was the Italian’s second goal in two Conference League starts and the manager hinted that he may soon be ready to start the No7 in the Premier League.
Alphonse Areola was called upon to make a superb double save on the stroke of half-time and that proved to be Viborg’s final chance of salvaging something from the second leg and the tie overall as second half strikes from Saïd Benrahma and Tomáš Souček secured a 6-1 aggregate victory.
There were also starts for Thilo Kehrer and Maxwel Cornet, while Flynn Downes and debutant Armstrong Okoflex appeared off the substitutes’ bench.
The final margin of victory may have been comfortable, but Moyes praised Viborg and their supporters for the challenge they presented his Premier League side, before looking ahead to Friday’s group-stage draw and the prospect of six group-stage matches between now and November.
We did OK. We got the goals that we needed and made sure the tie was won.
I was a bit happier, I was pleased with the goals and little bits I thought were a bit more competitive than we’ve been.
We feel we’ve not shown enough of it the supporters in how we play, so we were probably a bit better tonight.
I thought Gianluca did a lot of good things.
Again, we can’t be expecting too much from him, too soon. We need to give him a chance to get ready, but he certainly did a great job for us.
Look, he scored two goals for us in two [European] games, so he’s certainly getting a lot closer to being ready to play [from the start in the Premier League] now.
I’ve got to say it wasn’t an easy game for us.
They told us it was one of the biggest games in their history tonight and there was a great atmosphere in the stadium.
We knew it was going to be tough because they’re a really good footballing team.
It is a special thing being in Europe and what makes it really special is that you don’t get it very often.
You can sometimes find people who treat it with a bit of disrespect, but I wanted to make sure we treat it with great respect because I want us to try and do well and compete it in.
Now we’ve got another period of European football and playing games in places we’ve maybe not done before, so we look forward to it.
The only way you get in Europe is if you do well in your domestic league, so we’ve done well in our domestic league the last couple of years.
That got us in it, and I want to try and do well in it.
We tried really hard last year and we had a great run in it and now we’ll obviously try and do the same in this competition.
We have to take the confidence from this game and improve our form generally.
But we’re also trying to bed in lots of new players and tonight we gave two or three new players more minutes and are trying to get them used to us.
