David Moyes is hoping his West Ham United squad can maintain their level of performance over the first ten games over the remainder of the Premier League season.
The Hammers rose to fifth in the table after a hard-fought 2-1 win over Aston Villa at London Stadium, where goals at the start of either half from Angelo Ogbonna and Jarrod Bowen secured a third straight top-flight victory.
Villa levelled in between through Jack Grealish’s first-half equaliser before Ollie Watkins missed a penalty and had a goal disallowed for offside late on.
Manager Moyes admitted his team had not hit the same performance levels they had in recent matches but, with 17 points from their opening ten games, he is hoping the Hammers can continue to improve as the season progresses.
We didn’t play well tonight but we picked up three points and I’m more than happy to take them.
Aston Villa have beaten some good teams this year and they were unbeaten away from home and hadn’t conceded a goal away from home, so for us to get a couple of goals tonight was good.
It was always going to be tight because Villa are a good team and I think we’ve got a good team. They’ve made some really good signings and have got one or two really good individuals who can hurt you and we were aware of that, and they caused some problems tonight, they really did.
I think both teams know they have improved and are fighting for things and we want to be competitive as much as we can, and we tried to do that.
I didn’t like the first half and I didn’t really like the second half.
Well, I liked the first five minutes of the first half and the first five minutes of the second half, but overall, we did the job.
We didn’t play enough or as well as we have been playing, but we stuck at it.
It’s a great start and I hope we can keep that up.
It’s something which we can’t promise the supporters and I said at the start of the season, let’s stop promising the supporters what we can do. Let’s go about it and over-achieve if we can.
I think the players have over-achieved in the early part of the season in terms of their performances, which have been really good.
We’re building on it and we’re growing in confidence. We won a little bit ugly tonight, but I’ll take that sometimes.
I was more disappointed with our overall defending than I was with any decisions that went against us.
We have got to defend better, but we’ve had four penalties against us and we’re fifth in the league and haven’t had one for us.
We feel as if, not that I can say tonight there were any opportunities for penalties for us, but we’ve not had our share of that.
But we have had good decisions go for us and scored some goals ourselves in the end, so we’ll take it.
We’re planning for Saturday now. We’ll tidy up tomorrow and we’ll get the players ready and hopefully have them ready to go again.
We’ll need to play much better and my aim is to get a better team performance, but I’ll take the same performance and another three points, don’t you worry about that!