David Moyes admitted multiple mistakes had cost his West Ham United team any chance of victory against Newcastle United on Wednesday evening.
After hitting the post within a minute, the Irons fell 2-0 down inside 13 to two simple goals scored by Callum Wilson and Joelinton – an unmarked header and a run in behind and finish – before rallying and pulling one back through Kurt Zouma’s far post header from Jarrod Bowen’s corner.
The hosts built momentum before half-time, but could not force an equaliser before the break, then took the wind out of their own sails by conceding an avoidable third to the Magpies within a minute of the restart, when Jacob Murphy robbed Nayef Aguerd and set up Wilson for an unmissable close-range finish.
As West Ham ran out of ideas at the attacking end, Newcastle punished their opponents ruthlessly. First, substitute Alexander Isak intercepted Łukasz Fabiański’s clearance and lobbed in from 25 yards, then Joelinton completed the scoring by firing low into the bottom corner at the end of a counter attack.
Speaking to West Ham TV with a voice hoarse from issuing instructions to his team, manager Moyes was clearly disappointed, but vowed that his players would regroup and bounce back, starting at Fulham on Saturday, as they continue to fight for Premier League safety.
We were terrible defensively tonight.
I thought the first and second goal were incredibly poor but I suppose it doesn’t help when they don’t come close to how bad the third and fourth were.
That was a night where I thought we may have created more opportunities than we did against Southampton and there were bits of play that were better than they were against Southampton tonight.
We were up against a better side and they opened us up at times and created chances, but we did as well.
We were in 2-1 down at half-time and were back in the game, but then came out and gave away a goal after 30 seconds.
I actually thought we played well in the opening five minutes before we conceded the opening goal from a corner.
We hadn’t done an awful lot wrong except our defending was really, really rotten tonight and obviously when went 2-0 down we left ourselves a mountain to climb.
We stuck at it, got a goal from a set piece which we hadn’t been doing and had one or two other half-opportunities and we just didn’t take them.
At half-time, the message was ‘let’s get the second goal, be patient if we have to be patient with it’, but within seconds we were 3-1 down.
We got great reaction last year when we were winning games and I suppose if you’re not winning then you get a different reaction.
We’re going to go away and get ourselves ready [for the challenges to come].
I don’t think we’ve got anything to show or anything to prove but deep down, after that, we got beat tonight badly and we have got to bounce back.
