David Moyes was brimming with pride as he spoke to West Ham TV following his final home game as Hammers manager.
The Scot is not a man who usually betrays too much emotion, aside from when his team is winning major European trophies, when he is prone to running down the touchline and leaping high into the air.
And that was the case again after Saturday’s 3-1 Premier League win over Luton Town at London Stadium, where the Claret and Blue Army gave him a rousing, supportive and deserved send-off at the end of four-and-a-half unforgettable years in charge.
In what was his 260th game at the helm, his West Ham team registered their 112th win, giving him a 43% win rate – second only to Billy Bonds of the 17 permanent managers in the Club’s 129-year history. In the same period, Moyes' Irons have lost 95 games, meaning he has won 17 matches more than he has lost.
When Moyes returned at the end of December 2019, West Ham had won five league games in five months and were sat one place above the Premier League relegation zone.
Four-and-a-half years on and the Irons have secured three top-ten Premier League finishes in four seasons, reached three consecutive European quarter-finals and won their first major trophy in 43 years – all of them under the 61-year-old’s steady hand.
Understandably, then, Moyes was in positive mood as he reflected on a job well done…
It’s why I keep saying what you want above everything in football is winning. You want a lot of other things, but what’s important is winning.
It makes the difference and covers a lot of other things, whether that be how you play, your style or whatever you do, and we got a really good win today.
We deserved it in the end up against a team who had everything to fight for.
At the start, they were better, but we certainly grew into the game and did much better in the second half.
We need our top players to stand up and when they don’t we need our other players to keep it steady and do their jobs well and give us 7/10 every week as well.
When that happens, we also need the boys at the back to not concede any goals when we’re not playing very well.
Look, we were disappointed to concede a goal in the first half, but overall I thought we did well. We made a few chances in the first half and didn’t score, but the second half was certainly better.
The one thing I will say is that we’ve always tried to bring in good players and good characters.
There is no manager trying to sign any bad players! We’re always trying to bring in good ones. Some of them have been great, some of them not, but that’s football management.
I have to say, they’ve been great to work with and overall they’ve been great lads. At Rush Green, I’ve said many times that it’s been tough love with them, and some are OK to take it and some are not, but overall it’s been a great time.
Look, it comes to down to winning and in the main over the four years, we’ve won.
We’ve had much more success than negatives. We’ve had our days when we’ve been knocked out of cups when we shouldn’t have. We’ve had our days when we lost heavily, as we have a couple of times this season, but overall over the last four-and-a-half years we’ve made progress.
I think it’s got a much higher profile than it probably did a long time ago. Instead of 60,000, we’ve got 62,000. There are a lot more young supporters and that’s what I see.
I think all those things are progress and the Club will have to build up and keep going.
There are lots of challenges in the Premier League because of the big money at some of the clubs and we’re probably not one of the clubs in that category, so over the four years we’ve actually challenged pretty well.
The reception I got touched me.
You hear a lot of noise and I’m a football supporter as well and I want my team to win, but like I said, most of the supporters in the stadium recognise that their team won more than it lost.
That’s helped us get strong positions in the league and let’s hope we can keep it going.
