West Ham United manager David Moyes is hoping a full week on the training pitches will stand his team in good stead for the finishing straight of the 2021/22 season.
The Hammers have had the rare luxury of a free midweek as they build-up to Sunday’s Premier League derby at Chelsea, giving the boss the chance to rest his players where needed, while working in a focused manner towards a series of crucial games at home and abroad.
With a potential league double over the Blues in their sights though, Moyes and the team have nothing but Chelsea on their minds for now.
It’s the first full week we’ve had for so long.
We’ve tried to use it to give the players some time off to recover and get ready. We’ve got a really exciting week ahead of us, so we’re just building everybody up. First of all we’ve got Chelsea on Sunday.
They’ve had the odd day off, but we’re really keen to keep them at it as we want to keep them sharp, ready to go and focused on playing. I think they have and it’s freshened us up. It’s freshened us all up.
Other teams might be used to it, but it’s new for us. We’re still in there, still in a decent league position and obviously in a semi-final of a major European competition.
We have to try and do the best we can in managing the squad.
We’ve managed quite well up to now and we’d have liked to have picked up a couple more points from the games recently after Thursdays, but overall if you look at the teams we’ve had to play and how we’ve played in them, we’ve tended to do okay.
We will just need to manage the squad again, keep working with them and try to get the right ones in, juggle them and get it right hopefully.
Chelsea were arguably the favourites for the Premier League in the first three months of the season.
I think since then we’ve seen the strength of Manchester City and Liverpool, but look, they’re the European champions from last year, they have an incredibly strong squad and have a really good team with a good manager.
Yes, they’ve had their ups and downs but I think most teams have except maybe the top two who are ploughing ahead.
We’re fighting on two fronts and we don’t want to give either of them up.
We’re trying to qualify for Europe through our league position and we also know there’s a huge prize if we can get through in Europe.
We’re trying to not throw everything into one basket, we’re trying to spread ourselves as thin as we can. It’s not been easy, but there is a month to go in the season and I remember saying we wanted to be in Europe after Christmas time.
We’re now in the verge of coming into May and we’re still in Europe, and that tells you we’re in a really good position.
In the main, if you look at how we’ve done in the league with the things we’ve had, we’ve done really, really well.
It’s incredibly challenging but we wouldn’t want it any other way.
We’re coming up to the end of April, we’re in Europe, we might make European football again through our league position depending on the points we pick up.
This time last year we were still dreaming about the chance to make Europe, thinking how incredible it would be. We’re in that position at the moment, and we’re in the semi-final of a major competition too, which we hope we can go further in as well.
We’re a club who wants more of this and we’ve got players who certainly do. The job now is to see whether we can do it again. We’ve got a big week ahead of us and we have to try to get the right results which help us both in the league and the cup competition as well.
We do have fond memories of the win at London Stadium, but I’ve also got memories of playing them at Stamford Bridge. You can’t have it all one way.
You have to think the other side as well. It was a great result for us in December against Chelsea when they were in top form and now we have to go to Stamford Bridge and try to get a result from that game as well.
