David Moyes took a deep breath, a sip of his cup of tea, shook his head and smiled before speaking to West Ham TV following Saturday's thrilling 2-1 Premier League win at Wolverhampton Wanderers.
The Irons conceded the first goal for the third game in a row to fall behind at Molineux, as a passive first-half performance saw Pedro Sarabia net from the penalty spot and send the visitors in a goal down and victory looking very unlikely.
But Moyes had other ideas, making two half-time changes by introducing Michail Antonio and Ben Johnson, then another when Jarrod Bowen was injured, sending on Aaron Cresswell, moving Emerson forward and switching to a back-three and wing-backs.
The personnel and tactical moves worked wonders as Emerson, who had conceded the earlier Wolves spot-kick, had an equalising header disallowed for a foul on Nélson Semedo, then popped up in the penalty area to win a spot-kick for the Hammers, which Lucas Paquetá converted.
Cresswell then won a corner six minutes of the 90 to play and James Ward-Prowse curled the flag kick over José Sá and into the far corner for an improbable winner.
Even then, there was more drama as Max Kilman headed in what Wolves believed was a late, late equaliser in the ninth minute of added time, only for referee Tony Harrington to overturn his decision and rule the goal out for offside against substitute Tawanda Chirewa, who was standing in front of goalkeeper Łukasz Fabiański.
It was a hugely eventful afternoon, then, but Moyes was ultimately able to celebrate his ninth Premier League win over Wolves - second only to Jürgen Klopp in the competition's history...
The second half was terrific. We looked much more like ourselves.
We had a few debates – because we played on Tuesday – about how we would play structurally. We knew that Wolves would play slightly differently and we chose to stick with something quite similar.
We moved the players around a little bit, but we needed to change [at half-time]. We went to three at the back later in the game and it made a huge difference to us. We controlled much more of the game.
We pressed much better, we passed it better and in the end we got a couple of goals from it.
Our shape wasn’t good enough in the first half and that’s something we’ll look at.
We tried to find ways, but it took until the second half to get anything like enough. I’ve got to praise the players, and I’ve got to praise the three boys who came on as sub today.
Ben, Micky, Cressy were all fantastic today and they made a big improvement on the team.
If the players who are in the team think they’re there and that’s them, they’re not. If they don’t play well they won’t be playing.
They need to [keep their] standards high and certainly in the second half things got better.
It’s not easy to come from a goal down in the Premier League.
This week we’ve been away at Newcastle and away at Wolves, and home to Tottenham, and the start of the week is something we don’t want to think about too much again.
But since then the boys have shown a great appetite to turn things around. We didn’t look at the races in the first 45 minutes today, I don’t know if we were still struggling with the game in midweek, or the travel up to Wolves is not an easy one as everybody knows, but overall at least we came back into it.
We still need our top players to really fire for us and make the difference.
Not many people score direct from a corner!
I’m going to praise James for it because of his technical ability, but I also think there was also a bit of blustery wind which may have helped.
But don’t take it away from him because he actually put in a brilliant delivery just before that from a corner and we didn’t have the players placed correctly to deal with it.
But overall he’s got a goal from a corner, and we’ve scored a goal from a penalty today, so it’s not necessarily been that we’ve got them in open play, but we’ve got them in other ways and at this stage of the season we need to take the points every way we can.
Wolves has always felt a difficult place to come to.
They’ve had some really good teams here over the years and they’ve got a big atmosphere here as well.
So, things went for us today and we got a decision right at the end of the game which might have gone against us.
I thought a penalty went against us in the first half, but overall we just about scraped through.
Jarrod got a knee into his hip or into his ribs.
I know if he’s had that he’ll be incredibly stiff and it could restrict his movement, so I’m going [to have to see], but as everybody knows we need those top players to be firing on Thursday night and Jarrod is one of them.
We’ve had a run of terrible decisions and even in the first half I thought 'this isn’t changing'.
I thought we are not getting a thing here, but am I really annoyed with the last one? I’m annoyed we didn’t win the header, that’s the biggest thing for me.
But look, I think the way football is going, if you don’t get yourself back onside when you’re making the goalkeeper – I think by what we’ve seen it looks offside.
