Even though Moyes was able to take some positives from that outing, overall, he believed his team did not do enough to win the Premier League contest.
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West Ham United manager David Moyes is understandably left frustrated with his team’s 4-3 loss to Crystal Palace in the Premier League. Palace have improved their game massively ever since Roy Hodgson took over as their manager recently. Since then, they have been supremely impressive in the league. Once struggling near the bottom three places, Palace have now done well to move clear of the danger. However, it is not the case for West Ham. They are still not entirely out of the relegation battle.
Even though Moyes was able to take some positives from that outing, overall, he believed his team did not do enough to win the Premier League contest. “Overall our performance didn’t warrant us getting much out of the game. I was hoping we’d get a point in the end but I didn’t think we played well enough. My teams don’t defend the way we defended today and that would be the key message really,” he was quoted as saying by the club’s website after the match.
“We didn’t look as though we got to grips with the game right away. We lost a lot of first balls, we lost a lot of second balls, I nearly felt that every ball in midfield went to them and we never picked anything up. They kept the pressure on us and we didn’t deal with that part of the game well enough. That’s the reason why we didn’t take anything out of it. Taking this game in isolation, we had to play on Wednesday and Palace played on Tuesday, which gives them a little bit of a lead in an early kick-off. I don’t want to use it as an excuse but it’s certainly a reason why we’ve maybe not been at our best today.”
From an attacking point of view, West Ham United are one of the best teams in set plays, as they are very difficult to defend against for opposition. “It’s probably the best we’ve been on set plays this season. We’ve started to look more threatening from them in the last month to be honest, and today if you get one goal from a set piece you’re doing well, but to get three [was great],” he explained.
However, what concerns Moyes the most is their inability to create sufficient chances from open play. “But we never made enough chances in open play at all and that’s the bit that bothers me, that I can’t get enough goals in open play from the players I’ve got in the team. We look a threat when we’ve got a corner kick or a free-kick, but open play is becoming a problem at the moment,” he added.
Despite the setback in their latest match, Moyes was happy with the players’ commitment. “You can’t question the players’ spirit at all to try and get back in the game. I’ve told the players that after the game, I can never question their professionalism or their work. They do try, maybe we’re lacking a bit of quality at the moment, or confidence in bits of our passing, or how we play out of the back. We have to get that confidence and keep it. Some of our results recently have made us feel good, but today we didn’t do any of the basic things well,” he explained.
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