David Moyes believes a hard-fought, slightly fortunate, last-gasp 2-1 Premier League win at Burnley will set his West Ham United squad up positively for the busy period ahead.
The Irons looked on course to lose at Turf Moor after a penalty conceded by Mohammed Kudus and converted by Jay Rodriguez put the Clarets ahead early in the second half, but West Ham simply refused to accept they would be beaten.
And so it proved as the Premier League’s bottom club conceded twice in the final five minutes and added-time and West Ham were somehow celebrating their third away top-flight win of the season.
Kudus created both goals, firing in a cross that Dara O’Shea put through his own net under pressure from substitute Divin Mubama, then lofting an inch-perfect centre to the far post for Tomáš Souček to lash past James Trafford on the volley.
The winner was the Czech’s second in successive Premier League matches following his late intervention against Nottingham Forest a fortnight previously, and his fourth in successive games for Club and country after his two goals fired Czech Republic to UEFA Euro 2024.
Moyes admitted to West Ham TV that his team had not played to their potential but, with determined opponents, his own players flying in from international duty all over the world and both Michail Antonio and Jarrod Bowen absent through injury, this was a victory that he, his players and staff would take confidence and belief from.
We got a goal out of nothing. Divin done great and worked it through and we got the own-goal from it. Divin did brilliantly to make the opportunity.
It didn’t look like we were going to get one. We had about three or four corners and the ball was not going in, then we had a couple that were headed out and we shot wide or had it blocked, and I thought it looked like we weren’t going to get it.
But we’re resilient and we stick at it and the players don’t give in. They’ve got great commitment, all of them, so there was always a chance we were going to do that and thankfully we did it today.
I’m glad I’m hearing Mo wanted to put things right because that’s the attitude I want to hear from all my players.
He had a really hard day because he’s been away on international duty all over Africa [to Ghana and the island of Comoros in the Indian Ocean] for games and he came back really late and had very little training.
In the last ten minutes he lit it up for us, he started to do better. He was quiet for long periods in the day today, but we were generally quiet and we didn’t play as well as we could have done, especially in the first half. In the second half we played and looked more threatening than we did in the first half.
The biggest worry for me today was Eddy Álvarez, as he only got back to Heathrow at five o’clock on Thursday afternoon.
He had extra-time in his game for Mexico and he also had the jet lag and anybody who has been to the American side of the Atlantic will tell you how bad the jet lag is.
On another day we might have said we wouldn’t play Eddy because he was out of steam on Friday, and I said to him I was always going to take him off, but when he got booked it made the decision easy because I needed to try and protect him a little bit.
The boys who go away, it’s really difficult for them to go away and be really at it in the next game.
Danny Ings did a lot of good things in the first half. He held it up quite well when we got it into him but we didn’t create any chances.
But I have to say when we needed to chase the ball in the second half and we were running out of a bit of legs, Divin has got bundles of it. He’s a willing worker and it doesn’t bother him if you ask him to do two or three jobs.
He’s an East End boy, a West Ham boy, so he’s playing for his home team.
Tomáš has done great.
It’s difficult because we’re trying to get the right blend in the team and the right players in, but we’re also trying to get the players who are in form in the team and Tomáš is certainly in form.
He has six goals this season already, so that alone is a really good starting point and I thought when he got the chance today he took it like someone who is in a confident mode of scoring.
He’s doing great. In his first season he got us about ten goals and if he could match that it would be fabulous.
What I can do is show the players we didn’t play well today, but at the end of it we got a good win.
Any win away from home in then Premier League [is great], and for us we’ve found wins hard to come by, but we found a way of getting through it today.
We gave away a soft penalty that on another day might not have been given, but anyway, we should resilience and stuck at it and we’ll go back smiling.
We’re top of the league in Europe and we’ve got another game in midweek and we have a League Cup quarter-final coming up, so we’ve got a lot of things to look forward to.
