David Moyes said his West Ham United team showed glimpses of returning to their best form in securing a hard-fought 1-0 Premier League win at Aston Villa.
The Hammers marked their 1,000th Premier League fixture with a welcome victory in the West Midlands, where Pablo Fornals scored in his third consecutive game against Steven Gerrard’s side, all of which have ended in wins.
This was West Ham’s fifth straight Premier League success against their Claret and Blue rivals, and a pressure relieving one at that, as the Spaniard’s deflected 74th-minute goal was the Irons’ first in the top-flight this season, and also earned Moyes’ side their first points of 2022/23.
After a turgid first half, the manager switched from a 3-5-2 formation to his tried and trusted 4-2-3-1 and sent on Saïd Benrahma. The changes, combined with an increase in intensity from the men in all-black, saw the Hammers gradually take control and take a lead their play at the time warranted.
Even then, West Ham failed to put the game beyond their increasingly desperate hosts, and Gerrard’s side piled on some late pressure that, thankfully, did not result in an equaliser.
When the final whistle was blown, the players and manager celebrated their first Premier League win over the campaign with the jubilant 3,000 travelling fans.
Next up? Tottenham Hotspur at London Stadium on Wednesday evening…
In the Premier League, all the games are going to be tough and it doesn’t matter who you’re playing, it’s always going to be a huge challenge.
I think it’s got even more competitive this season but for us, at this time, it was a really important three points for us.
We earned the right to play in the second half by working hard in the first half and staying in the game. I said to the players at half-time ‘We’re nil-nil, so you’ve got a great chance now’ and we had to take it and do better and we did.
We just felt that we weren’t doing well enough at half-time, so we changed it and decided to do what we thought was right.
We got more of the ball, we controlled a little bit of the game and gave ourselves a better opportunity to make chances, which we did.
But we wanted to start the game positively with two up-front (in Antonio and Bowen) and give ourselves more opportunities at goal, but it slightly worked the other way.
We just felt that we weren’t doing well enough at half-time, so we changed it and decided to do what we thought was right.
We got more of the ball, we controlled a little bit of the game and gave ourselves a better opportunity to make chances, which we did.
But we wanted to start the game positively with two up-front (in Antonio and Bowen) and give ourselves more opportunities at goal, but it slightly worked the other way.
Look, if I was Aston Villa, I’d be disappointed to have lost a goal like that in what was an incredibly tight game.
They played really well in the first half and we couldn’t get near them. I quite like the way we started, but then after that we faded away and they controlled the game.
The caused us problems with the movement of their midfield players and the rotation of their midfield players into wide areas and we really couldn’t deal with it.
I thought we had actually loosened up and played a bit better before the goal.
We looked as if we were getting closer to doing something and there were spells where we started looking like we were back to our old selves.
We’re not there yet, but in the second half we looked that way.
Everybody is really impatient wanting to see new players, but you have to trust the manager and that the manager is looking at it and making a decision from close-up as to who is ready and who is not.
Look, I thought the players put in a brilliant shift. I was really disappointed with the final five or seven minutes when we had it and continually gave the ball away and gave them a chance to come back at our goal, but overall it was much better.
It was nice to hear the crowd singing at the end and if you look at the last two and a half years, I would hope that they would look at that in the right terms.
If you’re looking short-term, that’s football, but we’ve had a great two and a half years and we’re about to go on another journey, hopefully for at least another two and a half years and at the moment we’re just piecing it together.
