David Moyes lamented his West Ham United team’s defending as they went out of the Emirates FA Cup through a disappointing late 3-1 fifth-round defeat at Manchester United.
The Irons looked on course for a famous victory at Old Trafford when Saïd Benrahma fired the visitors in front nine minutes into the second half, and had their chances further boosted when Casemiro’s header was ruled for offside following a VAR review.
Minutes later, Manchester United were level in slightly fortuitous circumstances when Nayef Aguerd headed Bruno Fernandes’ corner into his own net. Alejandro Garnacho then snatched victory for the home wide when he collected and curled past Alphonse Areola, before Fred’s deflected strike in the fifth minute of added-time gave the final scoreline a one-sided look in the Red Devils’ favour.
What made it even harder for Moyes to take was how well his team played for the opening 75 minutes, when they defended stoutly, controlled the midfield area and attacked repeatedly, only for Michail Antonio to twice be denied by West Ham’s regular nemesis David de Gea in the Manchester United goal.
Speaking to West Ham TV, the manager could hardly contain his frustration at seeing errors cost his side a place in a quarter-final draw that would have included just three other Premier League clubs.
It was disappointing defensively. I don’t think you can defend like that in any league I know of, or any division, so we can’t have any excuses for that.
But what I would say is that the players played really well at time tonight. We did an awful lot of good things in the game.
We maybe could have got the second goal which would have given us a chance to go two-nil up, which might have made things a bit calmer for us and we might have played it slightly different.
When we conceded the first goal it was going to be difficult, but I thought we gave them the goals really badly in the late part of the game
We played really well [for the first 75 minutes]. We wanted to be really brave on the ball and try and get hold of it and make some passes and I thought we played well.
I thought we had some really good counter-attack moments and we created some chances as well and we took it into the second half as well and we got our goal in front, which I thought overall in the piece we deserved.
We were a little bit unfortunate not to get two goals up, but the game is 90 minutes. We had a great chance to beat Manchester United in the Cup tonight and we’ve not taken it.
I don’t think I’d ever question the players’ commitment. It was more just poor decisions and making a poor connection the ball or not making the right choices.
So, all those things come into it, but it’s part of being a manager, isn’t it? You have to learn to live with those things as well and tonight we’d done an awful lot of good things and we’d done well enough to win the tie and go through, but we didn’t do the last bits that we needed to do well enough.
We told the players how well they’d played, we said that, but at the end of the day I’m not going to say ‘Well done’ when I’m losing.
I want to win and at the worst tonight we should have taken them to extra-time, at the worst, because for long periods we were the better team and we should have had more from it.
But we were just so sloppy defensively in the last ten minutes.
