David Moyes’ West Ham United team gave him an early 60th birthday present on his 200th game as Hammers manager in the shape of their biggest away Premier League win of the season at AFC Bournemouth.
The Irons scored twice inside the opening 12 minutes through thumping headers from Michail Antonio and Paquetá – the first time they had scored in the opening quarter-hour of a top-flight match in 2022/23 – before Declan Rice added a third just before half-time.
Pablo Fornals’ acrobatic volley made it four late on and, while Bournemouth themselves created chances to score, dogged defending and fine goalkeeping combined for a second away clean sheet in successive Premier League matches.
After watching his team extend their recent run to one defeat in ten matches in all competitions, with six wins, three days after seeing them secure a place in the UEFA Europa Conference League semi-finals with another four-goal show against KAA Gent at London Stadium, the manager was in a positive mood when he spoke to West Ham TV.
It’s much easier talking now because there’s much more to talk about, we’re scoring goals and getting some really good results.
We’ve not had many wins away from home so I hope today the supporters certainly enjoyed that one.
It was a great start. After playing Thursday night and having to go again on Sunday is never easy, and so often it’s the start of the games that are the really difficult bit, but we got off to a really good start and got a goal.
We got a couple of goals today from corner kicks, which we’ve not been doing so much this season, so really well done and it’s a great start for us.
We’re certainly much better [at pressing and turning the ball over high up the pitch].
We’re trying to get the ball back and play a bit quicker. We tried to be more counter attack based today again, which to be fair we were a little bit like that at Fulham too in our last away game.
I have to say, Bournemouth still gave us problems and had opportunities themselves, so it’s not as if we had a clear run at it. I just think we were a bit more clinical, got the goals at the right times and we needed it, because obviously with the energy deficiency from midweek it was always going to be difficult as Bournemouth are one of the teams in the Premier League who always run hard and play at a high intensity.
Paquetá is getting much closer to it.
I still think he can do even more but today we played him a bit higher up and closer to Mick and that’s what we bought him to do.
He made a difference for us today. He made chances, he made through passes, he put people on the attack and he also got in at the back post and scored a brilliant header from Vladi’s cross, so that was really the Paquetá that we hoped to bring and he would produce for us.
We know that we’re beginning to get closer to where we would like and we can sense it.
Look, we might not be quite as good as where we want to be, but hopefully running into form at this time of year for various reasons, whether it be the Premier League or European competition, we want to keep that going now.
The momentum and feelgood factor now give us a chance going into games and we’re not panicking so much how we’re going to play or what’s going to happen.
We’ve had a great week, I’ve got to say, coming from 2-0 down against Arsenal and scoring four against Gent and scoring four again today. And in both games we probably could have scored six, let’s be fair and honest as well.
Last week we had three games in seven days, the week before we had three games in six days, and this week again we have three games in six days!
We play Wednesday night and then we play at half-12 on Saturday, so it’s been a big ask for the players, and I hope we can keep it going, keep the momentum going.
Keep backing the players because they need your support all the time.
