West Ham United head into Christmas in the top third of the Premier League table following Saturday’s 2-0 win over Manchester United and for manager David Moyes, that caps a memorable year.
The Irons moved their points tally for the campaign to 30 by seeing off the Red Devils, courtesy of goals from Jarrod Bowen and Mohammed Kudus in the final 18 minutes at London Stadium.
Victory took Moyes’ side above his former employers in the table and secured back-to-back home successes in the league, as they bounced back from the midweek Carabao Cup exit at Liverpool in style.
Following a 12 months which has brought a European trophy, another successful group stage campaign on the continent, and a challenge at the business end of the league, Moyes has plenty of reasons to smile as Christmas 2023 arrives.
Thirty points for us at this point of the season is really top.
We’ve had a great start to the season. We did a good job today – we played two days ago and came back with a real disappointment, but we got players ready. We had some fresh to play, thank goodness we did, and we showed it in the second half.
Any win in the Premier League is really hard. We’ve got nine wins now and that’s a great total for us. We’ll try to kick on and hang in with the boys at the top, but it’s really difficult with what a lot of these clubs have got. But a great result today.
I hope all the supporters enjoyed today and enjoy a couple of drinks tonight.
We had to grind it out.
There will be games, when you ask the players to play so many, that you won’t get full excitement and great entertainment.
We didn’t mean to come and sit off them. They passed the ball out from the back quite well and sent us back.
We didn’t quite work it out [before half-time], but we got much better in the second half. The players are also still trying to think how they’re going to get through 90 minutes of the game right at the start, so there is a little bit of that after playing just two days ago.
But hey, we did the job against Manchester United who for most of the season have been up around the top six or seven. It’s an opponent who if we can beat it’s a great result for us.
When Paquetà went to nine he was amazing.
The way he kept the ball, linked us up and then he does what he does. He plays people in. His assist totals at the moment must be through the roof, certainly for us in the last few games.
The front three are all chipping in with what we want them to do. We’re a little bit short of scoring from set-pieces at the moment, but hopefully that’s to come later on and when those boys dry up we can get those goals from set-pieces.
Our record here [at London Stadium], I think, is as good as most [at home].
Of course we can think of clubs who will do better, but for us we’ve had a brilliant year. The players we’ve had, whether they’ve gone or whether it’s new ones we’ve brought in, we’ve had a fantastic year, with a trophy in the middle of it.
It looks like if you don’t quite give everyone what they want then you get criticism for it, but I don’t think we could have won today if we had played all the players in midweek.
