David Moyes says his West Ham United team will go to Burnley with no fear on Sunday afternoon.
The Hammers kick-off the matchweek fourth in the Premier League, having collected 27 points from their opening 15 games and beaten then-leaders Chelsea 3-2 at London Stadium in their most-recent top-flight fixture.
The Irons could strengthen their position with a win at Turf Moor, where Moyes' side scored an impressive 2-1 victory on their previous visit in May, and the manager says his team will head to Lancashire determined to make it back-to-back Premier League victories over Sean Dyche's Clarets.
Burnley themselves have won just one of 14 Premier League matches in 2021/22 and sit in the bottom three with ten points from 14 matches, but Moyes is not underestimating the challenge that will be posed by the home side under a manager in Dyche that he has great respect for.
Speaking to reporters during his virtual press conference, the Scot also welcomed the rising expectations around his own team, who finished sixth with a record 65 points last season and are looking to improve on both of those achievements this term, and discussed the return of COVID measures to Premier League training grounds amid the spread of the Omicron variant.
At the start of the season, my question was ‘Is there was any chance we could get two more points than we got last year?’ because that would have caught Chelsea in a Champions League position.
It doesn’t mean to say we’re going to do it and get there or we’re competing for it, but the challenge is just to see if we can have another strong season.
I was always worried after last season that we could have taken a little bit of a dip but I think, if anything, we’ve got better, we’ve improved, we’ve gone again and so we’re trying to keep those standards up.
I actually think we could have played far better than we’ve played in recent weeks, but there were possibly reasons for that, and overall the players are still producing and still performing at a high level and we’ll look for that to continue for the rest of the season.
I’ve said a couple of times that I do think raising expectations is part of the manager’s job because it probably means you’re doing well with the team.
But then, when you raise them, everybody starts to expect big things of a team which is relatively new.
I think our, I’m going to use the word ‘rapid’ climb to the higher reaches of the Premier League is something which has been unbelievable and a great achievement to get up there and keep it going.
At the moment, we’ve only been doing this for a year and a half since we were in a relegation fight, so we’re only in the early stages of showing we’re a side with higher expectations.
I’m happy to carry it off, I’m quite pleased we’ve got bigger expectations and I hope we’re able to keep it up. Maybe we can, maybe we can’t.
Instilling belief and a positive mentality in the players are certainly something we felt had to happen for us to be competitive and get better.
I thought last season, the players’ attitude throughout the season season was unbelievable, and I think the team spirit and mentality and all the things that make you successful come with winning as well, as winning games makes it better.
We’ve got a realy good mentality around the Club at the moment and we have to keep that going. We had a really good result against Chelsea, but prior to that we had a couple of results which weren’t so good, so we have to make sure we’re on them all the time about winning.
We’re a newish team trying to find ways of winning and keep that consistency up. It’s a challenge for us, but I have to say the players have done a great job.
We’ve got an attitude at the moment that we’re going to challenge anyone who comes in front of us.
We might not always be successful but we’re really positive in our approach and want to score goals if we can. All round, we’re determined to try and keep it going. I don’t see any way we’re flinching from it.
If we can get that level of consistency, keep moving along and growing with it, then hopefully we’ll keep picking up wins.
We always go into every game considering the opposition and, for example, we’ve got an incredibly tough game at Burnley.
Burnley are renowned for how they play and Sean Dyche has done as good a job as any manager in the Premier League when you consider over ten years with what he’s got available to him.
We have to consider the opposition but do we go in with any fear? No we don’t. We have a real feeling of confidence that we can perform and cause other teams problems as well.
I think everybody would expect Burnley to find a way of making sure they’re not in the bottom three, which Sean does most seasons.
I think he will be finding it a bit tougher because the Premier League has got stronger, that’s my feeling.
But Sean is a real fighter and his team do brilliant things. They find a way to stay in games and make it really difficult for you. They go into away games and are really tough to beat.
Turf Moor has never been an easy place to go an get a result. We played well there last year so I hope we can do so again this season.