David Moyes felt a 1-1 draw with Aston Villa was a fair result for his West Ham United side following another action-packed, drama-filled Premier League Sunday afternoon at London Stadium.
A week after seeing his team come from two goals down and a late penalty appeal turned down against Burnley, Moyes watched his Hammers take the lead, have two ‘goals’ disallowed either side of half-time, concede a late equaliser, then see a third ‘goal’ ruled out following a five-minute VAR review in added time.
West Ham were the better side in the first half, but only had Michail Antonio’s diving header from Vladimír Coufal’s cross – his seventh Premier League assist of the season – to show for their efforts as Mohammed Kudus had a second ruled out by referee Jarred Gillett for Antonio’s foul on Emiliano Martínez.
Gillett was then advised by VAR Tony Harrington to rule out Antonio’s effort for handball as the Jamaican diverted Jarrod Bowen’s corner past Martínez and, after Unai Emery had made four substitutions, Villa improved and equalised through replacement Nicolò Zaniolo.
Zaniolo himself then escaped being shown a second yellow card for throwing the ball away, before the Irons had a third and final ‘goal’ ruled out ten minutes into added time, when Tomáš Souček was adjudged to have handled as he bundled the ball in after Gillett had been called to the pitchside monitor to review his original decision to award it.
Speaking to West Ham TV after a game in which his team created as many goal attempts, 13, and shots on target, five, as their fourth-placed opponents, despite having just 30% possession, Moyes felt the overall result was a fair one…
I’m really pleased with the performance – certainly in the first 40 or 50 minutes I thought we did very well.
I thought we played great in the first half, actually. I thought there was some really good stuff, but we only had one goal to show for it, though.
When we got what we thought was the second goal disallowed just after half-time, it sort of changed and I thought Villa showed why they are such a good team and they made a couple of changes at half-time which improved them.
We found it more difficult, but we hung in, stuck at it and in the end we came really close to winning the game.
Mick has played 70 minutes in midweek and another 60-odd today, so we’re trying to manage it.
We’ve also got other people with fresh legs who we want to get on the pitch and give them minutes as well, but I thought it was just the right time to see if we could freshen it up.
They were the better team at the time and we couldn’t keep the ball and weren’t getting up the pitch too quickly, so trying to find other ways of doing it was what we tried to do, but he did a good job for us, Mick, and scored a really good goal.
I think Villa had a lot of the ball and we sat deep, but not by design. We wanted to try and press as high as we did.
A couple of changes they made changed it and a couple of quick players that they brought on in Zaniolo and Diaby gave us a bit of a problem in the positions they played.
We tried to solve it and the game was tight and obviously if we could have had another half-dozen chances to break away and score, we might have done so because we had a couple, but we just couldn’t get the three points.
I thought the team did a great job today.
We had a great result on Thursday and I thought the way they came into the game, they acted right and got after them.
As the game wore on, we saw we were going to start fatiguing a little bit, but we had our better players on and we wanted to see if we could get them to get us the goals and make us the chances, but, in the end, we just couldn’t quite hang onto it.
It was a great assist from Vlad.
He got some right at the start of the season and he’s got a few more since.
He’s a great lad and he’s great to work with and I think he puts in a shift in every week for the team and he’s a really good team player.
We have to be positive.
We had a handball decision against Burnley which didn’t go our way and we had a couple today which didn’t go our way, so we’re starting to feel as if we’re not doing enough here to get the results which we could maybe do.
I feel as if we’ve dropped some points, and I felt today we were going to get the three when we got the second goal, but we weren’t.
It was still a really good point against Aston Villa, so we’ll keep hanging in there. We’ve got some really big games coming up and unfortunately we’ve got some suspensions coming up, which are going to have an effect on us.
