David Moyes will never tire of tasting victory at Goodison Park, having done so 140 times during his eleven years as Everton manager, and he had that winning feeling again as his West Ham United side stormed back to secure a 3-1 Premier League success.
The Scot guided his Hammers to a third victory in five Premier League visits to this famous old stadium, where he previously experienced such joy as Blues boss, but few of those 143 wins will have been as dramatic as this one.
The Irons needed heroics from goalkeeper Alphonse Areola, who saved Beto’s penalty in added-time at the end of the first half when the game was still goalless, and made nine superb stops in total, to lay the foundations for a stirring second-half comeback.
Beto did head Everton in front eleven minutes into the second half but, after Areola had repeatedly thwarted Sean Dyche’s men, West Ham launched a late comeback to make it successive Premier League wins and climb back into the seventh place in the table.
Captain Kurt Zouma headed his team level from James Ward-Prowse’s corner before Tomáš Souček repeated his trick from New Year’s Day 2021 by scoring a winning goal at Goodison with an exquisite strike with the outside of his right foot.
Edson Álvarez then completed a memorable afternoon when he raced forward deep in added-time and converted Jarrod Bowen’s pass past Jordan Pickford.
Speaking to West Ham TV, Moyes was delighted to discuss his team’s sixth away win of the season…
I’m thrilled that we’ve got three points.
I know from my history that it’s never easy to win here, especially when we went a goal down as we had to come from behind to get there.
We had moments today that went for us – we saved a penalty kick and our goalkeeper made some brilliant saves during the game – but we had to score the goals as well and we got the chances and we took them.
We got a goal from a set-piece, which we’ve not been getting recently, or certainly not as many as we’d have liked.
Tomáš Souček took his goal brilliantly well from when it comes down and he scored a goal here late in the game during lockdown when we won one-nil and my memories came flooding back of that the minute we scored it. Then the breakaway for the third one was great.
We had some moments when things went for us today and it’s probably a harsh result on Everton, but a great result for us.
Over the years, I think what we’ve probably had was a bit of resilience and we’ve tried to show everybody how much we care and how much we want to win.
I think the players went about it well [after falling behind]. We made one or two changes with our formation and tried to see if we could make it a bit better.
Some of them worked and we got a win out of it.
Alphonse’s goalkeeping and his saves have been great.
You could hear the crowd here chanting his name here today and quite rightly so. He deserves all the plaudits he’s been given.
He played brilliantly well, saved a good penalty kick and we move onto European football again in midweek with a bit of confidence again.
We’ve won away from home, that’s back-to-back wins in the Premier League and we’ve come through a bit of a sticky patch in January and the start of February.
Hopefully we’re beginning to see the light a little bit, so let’s keep the form up.
