Aaron Cresswell is sure West Ham United require the mentality to dig themselves out of the hole they find themselves in at the halfway stage of the 2022/23 season.
Saturday's 1-0 defeat at Wolverhampton left the Hammers without a Premier League win in seven, after Daniel Podence's 48th-minute strike on the counter-attack settled a tight affair at Molineux.
The result was not for the lack of effort in the Midlands, as the visitors pushed and probed for a way back into the contest, but were unable to make the decisive move in the final third.
Cresswell has experienced a range of highs and lows in his eight-and-a-half years with the Club, and won every previous relegation battle he has been involved in, and he believes the team possess thee character to again pull out of a difficult situation.
"We’ve got some big leaders in the dressing room and there’s nobody shying away," he said. "We don’t want to be in this situation, we shouldn’t be in this situation on the back of the last two years we’ve had as a football club, but the reality is we are where we are, and it’s down to us to fight, to keep that spirit and keep believing.
"We’ve got to look forward to the next game [against Everton at London Stadium on Saturday] and try to take maximum points over the next few games."
The team's togetherness has been a feature of their success over the past three years, first to avoid the drop following the COVID shutdown in 2020, then to put together sixth and seventh-place finishes.
And the vice-captain, as a senior member of the squad, knows he ahd his teammates need to tighten things up at the back, be more clinical in attack and give 100 per cent from kick-off to finial whistle to turn losses into wins.
"We’ve been sloppy all over the park all season, and that’s why we’re in this situation," he admitted. "We’ve got to get ourselves out of this as fast as possible.
"So we’ve got to stick together. "We’re half-way through the season and we’ve got to keep going, keep fighting, keep believing and pushing on."
