David Moyes wants to end 2021 on a high when his West Ham United team head to Watford on Tuesday.
The Hammers close their fixtures for the year with a trip to Hertfordshire, hoping to put the Boxing Day defeat to Southampton behind them and get their push at the top end of the Premier League back on track.
A run of one win in the Hammers’ last seven league fixtures has seen them move from fourth to sixth in the table, but they are still in touch with the teams immediately above them and Moyes is challenging his players to find their best form again.
2021 was really good to us and we want to improve further in 2022.
Our standards have been so good and I’m trying to raise them much higher, so I’m driving them on to be better.
At the moment we’d like to get back to normal, where we can get players playing more consistently in their performance.
There’s mitigating circumstances in all that but overall what the players have achieved this year has been incredible. I can’t pat them on the back and say: ‘Well done, that’s it.’ The next part is to say: ‘No, we want to do better’. And we’re trying to do better.
We’ll hit bumps in the road but the key is in how we overcome them.
Finding ways to improve when you’re not doing so well is part of the job. You’re never on a journey in football where it’s always going one way and we have to find a way of getting a better level of performance and more consistency out of players who we’ve seen can do much better than how some of them are performing at the moment.
This is the time of year when I start to think if you want to be in contention, you need to kick into gear and start picking up points. We did it last season, and my memory is that coming into January we got stronger, so I’ve got that in my mind if we can look towards that.
Obviously we don’t want to give up games cheaply and we need to do better than on Boxing Day.
Christmas is a difficult time of year with the schedule, but we’ll get the players ready to go again.
We’re looking to go again. We’ll get the players ready – it’s a difficult time of year for players, but I hope we can get them all fit, available and ready to play. We’re obviously hoping we can improve our performances as well.
Recovery is huge. Look, even with the best recovery, whatever that may be and everybody will have their own ideas on it, let’s be fair – one day in football nowadays isn’t enough to do it.
You have to remember Watford haven’t played for 18 days I think so it’s not something that lies easily with me, but that’s the situation and that’s what we’re doing. I’ve played Christmas games all my career so we’ll go ahead with it.
Watford is always a tricky place to go to.
Claudio Ranieri is an incredibly experienced manager. They had a really good uplift at the start, they’ve had one or two results which haven’t gone quite the way they wanted, but they look as if they’re playing in a way to do everything they can to stay out of the bottom three.
It’s never been an easy game at Watford and I don’t think this one will be easy either.
We’ll have to do without Declan Rice due to a one-match ban on Tuesday.
He’s been a huge part of how we play and what we’ve done.
If you look back to the last part of last season, we won a few without him. We lost a couple of big games without him too, but I think when we didn’t have him for about five games last year we did okay.
He’s really important, he’s a big member of the team here and we always knew he was only one booking away and it happened on Sunday.