There was little time for David Moyes to reflect on Thursday night’s UEFA Europa League reverse to Olympiacos, as attention swiftly switched to Sunday’s Premier League match-up against Everton.
The Hammers got back to work at Rush Green on Friday morning, having arrived back from Greece in the early hours, with Moyes determined to return to winning ways when they face the Toffees at London Stadium.
An opportunity to climb back towards the upper reaches of the Premier League table lies ahead of Moyes and his team this weekend, although, as he told the gathered media, he expects the Merseysiders to put up a stern test…
Everton will be a tough nut to crack
Everton are a hard nut to crack. They’ve probably played a little bit better away from home this season, so we expect it to be a really tough game.
I don’t see them getting turned over easily, I don’t see teams beating them easily – I see a resilient team who keep at it, and on their day they have players capable of scoring goals.
We’ve just got ourselves back, we’ll get ourselves ready for Everton. Every Premier League game is difficult – Everton is a tough game – and we’ll approach it the same as we’d approach any other game.
Sean Dyche is doing an excellent job
I think Sean has done a brilliant job, more importantly last season in keeping them in the Premier League.
Last year was probably the toughest I can remember in the Premier League regarding the relegation side of the league. We were involved in that for long periods as well.
Dychey went right to the end and kept his team up, so congratulations to him. It looks as it might be a difficult period for Everton right now with the financial situation, so he’s having to steer them through that.
It was a tough game in Greece
It was always going to be a difficult game. Anybody who knows about going to play at Olympiacos will tell you how difficult it can be.
We didn’t perform as well as we’d have liked, but nevertheless we’ve had a really good start to the group and hopefully we can keep that going the next time we play them.
Playing in that atmosphere was a big experience for the players. Hopefully all those things help us [going forward]. We’ve had two really good years in Europe and last night was another experience we’ll remember.
If you’d said to me at the start of last season you’d go 17 unbeaten and then you lose one in Europe, I’d have taken that all day long.
We’ve always mixed it up in Europe
If you look back over those 17 games we went unbeaten, we made changes in every one of those games. It’s only when we got to quarter-finals and semi-finals that we began to pick more of what would look like our first eleven.
I’ve always wanted to use the players in the squad, I’ve wanted to give them opportunities to show what they can do. I want them to get game time, and we did that again on Thursday night.
It’s something we’ve done regularly here and I’ll continue to do it if I feel it’s the right time. What I will say is that I think this year is the hardest group we’ve been drawn in, with Freiburg and Olympiacos especially.
So you have to try and balance to have teams ready to play again on the Sunday. We’ve tried to do that over the last two years and I think we’ve done a pretty good job at it.
The bread and butter for us will always be the Premier League and we have to be ready for these games.
We have a run of home games coming up
It does feel like an advantage. If you look at our start to the season, I was moaning a little bit because I thought we had a really unfair start to the season. We had three away from home in the first four games of the season, and even in the next batch of games, it kept us in a negative side regarding being away from home.
Hopefully it will help us now having four of the next five at home. We’ve been good enough at home – we’ve had some tough games and we expect some more to come.
Premier League football on Christmas Eve
I’m pretty disappointed to hear there will be a game [between Wolves and Chelsea] on Christmas Eve.
I think there’s a culture here where there are days where we put [football] aside. Players, coaching staffs get very little time with their families and very little opportunity to be together because of the work schedule we’ve got, and this is another one of those moments that I’d be against it because it’s one of the times in the year when people do get the chance to be together.
It's only a short period too because we’ve already got an incredibly busy Christmas and New Year schedule. I find it quite strange.
