David Moyes was delighted with West Ham United’s resilient and resolute defensive showing as the Hammers fought to a 0-0 draw with Brighton & Hove Albion.
London Stadium saw its first Premier League stalemate since September 2018 on Tuesday evening, but the scoreline only tells part of the story from a tightly contested outing.
Both the Hammers and the Seagulls had chances to score, with the hosts seeing chances missed by Tomáš Souček and James Ward-Prowse. Brighton, meanwhile, could not find a way past Alphonse Areola, despite decent efforts from Adam Lallana, Jack Hinshelwood and Pascal Groß.
With key first-team players missing due to the Africa Cup of Nations, injury or illness, manager Moyes was particularly thrilled with how his starting XI adapted and competed against Brighton, praising the defensive players on show in east London.
A first point of 2024, added to the three wins at the end of December, means ten points from four matches in the festive period and 417 minutes without conceding. All of which equals a successful spell for Moyes and his team in the Premier League…
If you said to me at the start of the season that we’d take four points against our bogey team, I’d have taken that all day long.
The other part of it is, of course, you want to perform better with the ball and play better. We defended really well again. We were resilient with what we had, which is a big part of football.
The defensive boys played brilliantly. They really did.
They did brilliantly well. I thought we played better in the first half with the ball than we did in the second half. We turned it over three or four times at the start of the second half and we weren’t having the ball. We were then nearly playing on scraps and counter-attacking, which wasn’t overly nice to watch, but it was a good point to get.
Tomas Souček missed a really big chance for us to go a goal up and, recently, we’ve been taking those opportunities.
We didn’t get it tonight. The chance we had right before half-time, the one from the wide free-kick, I think that one probably made me think ‘goodness me, we’re maybe not going to get anything tonight’.
We’ve had a lot of these boys [who came into the team] playing in the UEFA Europa League so most of them should have had a bit of [pitch] time and be ready, and most of them showed it.
Players like Pablo Fornals, Dinos Mavropanos, Saïd Benrahma, Angelo Ogbonna and Ben Johnson have not played as much as others, and we had to make a few changes tonight. I actually think, against a good Brighton team who had to make changes as well, I think it was a good result.
It's been a brilliant festive period.
For us to win three and draw one game, it’s been a good period for us. We’re always looking to judge it on the performances and I didn’t really enjoy this one, but we got what I think was a hugely important result for us against one of the top teams in the country.
If we’re being honest, we’ve had a really good Christmas.
It’s been a fair programme for this time of year for what it could be, but our programme before that wasn’t overly fair. You could argue about fairness in terms of not being able to play Mohammed Kudus or Nayef Aguerd tonight, but other teams could play their African players.
But the players have been able to have a day or two off here or there, which has been benefited them, and it looks like we might be able to have a bit of a break with the week we’ve got coming up and the players deserve it for the really good first half of a season they’ve had.
