David Moyes admitted his team have played as they did in Sunday’s 0-5 Premier League defeat at Chelsea too often this season.
Having fallen to a 2-5 scoreline on their last away trip to Crystal Palace, the Hammers found themselves with a mountain to climb by the 36-minute mark at Stamford Bridge, following goals from English trio Cole Palmer, Conor Gallagher and Noni Madueke.
Any faint hopes of securing a fourth successive season of European football were all but quashed within three minutes of the second half when Nicholas Jackson notched his first of the game, before he completed his brace with ten minutes of the contest remaining.
The hosts welcomed Moyes’ men to west London in a rich vein of form, having tasted defeat in just one of eleven top-flight fixtures, but the visiting manager admitted his players didn’t exhibit anywhere near enough of the grit and fight that earned a share of the spoils against Liverpool in their previous encounter.
Now down to ninth in the standings, and five points off the seventh-placed Blues, who have played a game fewer, the Irons will be looking to restore their pride on their final home outing against Luton Town next weekend.
It was a difficult afternoon, and in the second half of the season we’ve probably had too many difficult afternoons.
We just looked as if we were lacking real mental toughness and leadership out there today, which is obviously disappointing.
The manager will always be the one who gets questioned and asked about what you do in these situations, but this is the same team that played against Liverpool last week and drew 2-2.
We had to come and do a similar job to last week, but defensively and the jobs in front in midfield were so badly done today, which made it really difficult.
People want us to play with our best players, which we’re trying to do, but it’s exposing other areas of the pitch.
Maybe we haven’t quite got the right organisation, and the players don’t work quite right in such a strict structure.
Over the last three years I think there’s been a really strict structure here, but it’s got us good results and it’s got us European football. Today, our structure was so poor, players were out of position, and they didn’t do their jobs well enough.
We’ve probably played 12, 13, 14 more games than some other teams this season, which does have an impact, but we had a whole week to prepare for this game.
I’ve said all along how difficult it is to play Thursday-Sunday, so I can’t back that up today with the way we’ve performed. Chelsea played Tottenham in midweek, and then were right at it again today.
Chelsea are in a good moment, let’s be fair. They started the season poorly and have picked up, while we started the season well and have now found ourselves not in a good run in the second half of the season.
We’ve been sixth, seventh or eighth for the majority of the season, so I have to be careful not to be too critical of the players.
Over the course of the season the players have done a good job, but obviously recently there have been some things we’ve not liked. Even today, we hit the bar three times and Emerson had a great chance, so things could have been different.
I’m a proud man and I want my teams to do well in every match. There’s nothing that would please me more than coming here, winning and clapping the supporters. It’s the opposite today, which is very frustrating.
Hopefully we can bounce back in our last home match of the season against Luton next week.
We want to win all our games, and we wanted to win today, but it would be great if we could sign off in the right way at home.
We’ve got a big week ahead of us back in training, and we’ll make sure we’re ready to go again. That’s all we can ever do in football in these situations.
