David Moyes speaks to press following last night’s Europa League defeat to Olympiakos. He’s looking ahead to Sunday’s clash with Everton hoping he can get the Hammers back on track.
He praised Everton and the job that Sean Dyche has done with the club since stepping in as manager:
“We’ve got ourselves back and will get ourselves ready for it.
“Every Premier League game is difficult and we’ll approach it as we approach every other game.
“Everton are a hard nut to crack, they’ve probably played a bit better away from home this season. I don’t see teams beating them easily, I see a resilient team who keep at it and they have players capable of scoring goals.
“I think Sean has done a brilliant job keeping them in the Premier League last year when it was the toughest I can remember on the relegation side. Congratulations to him for that.
“It looks as if it might be a difficult period at Everton right now with the financial situation, but he’s steering them through it.”
Moyes defended his decision to keep rotating the squad due to a high number of fixtures to be played for West Ham:
“Look, we changed a lot of players, we’ve got the Premier League coming up and we’ve got a League Cup game next week and we’d won the first two games in the group, which gave us leeway to make changes tonight.
“But maybe I have to recognise that while we didn’t win the Conference League games easily, as they were all tough games, coming to Olympiakos after winning away in Freiburg – which was a good result – this wasn’t a good result and wasn’t a good performance.
“In our heads we certainly had a bigger picture in our heads and that was going into Sunday.
“I don’t think anybody could say the team we started with wasn’t a good team and wasn’t a team capable of winning or performing.
“Many of them have been very good players for us over the years and still are.
“You have to look back at those 17 unbeaten games and in all 17 we’ve made changes.
“I’ve always wanted to use players in the squad, to give them the opportunity to show what they can do and we did it last night.
“What I will say, is that this year is the hardest group we’ve been drawn in.”
West Ham’s next run of fixtures might fortune Moyes’ side as the next 5 games are home matches:
“It does feel like an advantage.
“At the start of the season we had what I thought was an unfair start when we had three of the first four away from home. Hopefully, it will help us now.
“We’ve been good enough at home, we’ve had some tough games and got some tough ones to come as well.”
Add Sportslens to your Google News Feed!
