Tests continue to come thick and fast for West Ham United this season, but manager David Moyes is confident his players can continue to demonstrate robustness and determination against Arsenal at London Stadium on Sunday.
A little under 70 hours after the Irons concluded their UEFA Europa League semi-final first leg against Eintracht Frankfurt, with work still to do in the second leg, a Premier League match against the Gunners is set to commence.
The visit of Arsenal to London Stadium will mark the Hammers’ eighth match in a run of ten fixtures in just 35 days between 3 April and 8 May – with potentially as many as three more games set to follow in the subsequent fortnight.
Yet Moyes – who first brought current Gunners boss Mikel Arteta into Premier League football via Everton, before handing him the captain’s armband – is backing his players to demonstrate the resilience which has thus far characterised their season.
I’m disappointed in Thursday night’s result, but we’ve moved on.
The game’s gone now, so looking forward to the next game. We’ve moved on quite quickly. We’re getting ready for the Arsenal game now.
We’ll be happy to talk about the second leg next week, but at the moment we’re considering Arsenal.
I’m not an expert on Arsenal, but I know a bit about Mikel Arteta!
I think he’s done a really good job. They were in the semi-finals of the Europa League last year and it shows how well they’ve come on from what they’ve done last year.
They have continued to build this year. Sometimes, missing out on European football has an advantage and gives you the chance to concentrate a little bit more on the league, but when you’re a big club, you want to be in Europe.
I’m sure Mikel wants his teams to be in Europe.
Arsenal have got some incredibly good technical players.
They have a very good style of play, and it’s different from Eintracht Frankfurt’s. Frankfurt also have a distinctive style, maybe a little bit more of a counter-attack style with speed.
Arsenal are more of a side who build their play. They’ve got a really good set pattern but also it’s got flexibility and it’s quite difficult to look at and understand.
I’ve seen a bit of Arsenal, and they are a good side.
The number of games is the fun of being in European competition, especially in the latter stages, when maybe there’s much more at stake in the games.
We’ll get ourselves ready. We’ve been quite robust all season, so I’m hoping that we’ll be able to show that again.
I think ideally you would always like to reward your young players [with game time], and some of our U23s have done great this year.
They’re going to finish second in the league behind Manchester City, which is an incredible achievement really from where they’ve come.
Not just that, I think our U18s are second in their league and the U17s have just won the London Cup, so there’s an awful lot of things behind-the-scenes which are beginning to grow and get better here.
When it’s games like Arsenal and the games are at this level, I think you need to be careful about putting young players in because you need to make sure you help your senior players as well, and that they’ve got enough belief to rely on the players around them.
We’ve never qualified for European football two years in a row through our league position, but I think it’s really important we finish in the top seven and get another European campaign.
I want us to stay in there. We’ve been challenging for two years now. We made it last year and we want to try and do it again, because we’ve really enjoyed the journey we’ve been on with European games.
I think it’s lifted the level of the Football Club all-round and I think another year in Europe would be very good.
I hope it’s more than one more year, but overall, we want to qualify for Europe and as always, through your league position, that shows a consistency throughout the year and it shows a level of performances, so we want to keep that up.
