David Moyes believes West Ham United’s team spirit will prove key in achieving their aims come the end of the season.
The Hammers head into Saturday’s London Stadium meeting with Newcastle United looking to keep the pressure on the Premier League’s top four with a second straight home victory.
While the boss concedes that his side aren’t quite hitting top form right now, he has been heartened by their resilience in grinding results out and says that characteristic is sure to help push them forward.
The team spirit in the group is fantastic.
The atmosphere among the team has always been good here. One of the biggest things we have is a really good team spirit and a group of lads who are resilient. They’ve shown that again last week in their performance against Leicester, coming from behind. They showed it in the game against Kidderminster too, when we still needed resilience and team spirit to get through there.
We keep bobbing along, we want to improve our performances, but we have a really good spirit around the squad.
We might not have been at our best recently but we’re still scoring goals.
We’ve not found that quite as easy, but I have to say our goals haven’t really changed. We’re still scoring goals, it just hasn’t felt that way to me.
I think two or three individual players have not quite hit their levels, but defensively I was disappointed we conceded two goals last week. We have to eradicate that and try to be stronger defensively.
I’m really pleased with the goals we are scoring, because if we can find our top form in the run in it will stand us in good stead for the run in.
We have a group who are driven and determined to keep on improving. We took four points off Leicester City this year, which generally you would see as a pretty good return. Really, my expectations have grown from what I want from the players, supporter-wise that’s the same and that’s a good sign. A manager’s job is to try and build expectations and I think we’re doing that here.
Eddie Howe is doing a good job in stabilising Newcastle United.
It’s been a really difficult job to stabilise a club the size of Newcastle with all the changes that have gone on and maybe the expectations. I think Eddie is a really good steady hand, he’s someone who has shown he can build a football club. He’s got an idea of how he wants to play, he’s got a very good reputation in the manager’s circle for the good work he did at Bournemouth.
He's got a really big club now in Newcastle, their results recently have been good. They’ve got in some new signings which have helped as well. They’re a much tougher task maybe than they were at the start of the season, but I have to say Newcastle at any time is a tough task and we have to be at our best to get a result.
They’ve become a much more balanced team.
I think they’ve got a formation at the moment which is helping them and I think they’ve got players who are in positions which suit them and I think that’s giving them a good chance. Confidence and momentum is a big thing in football as well, and they would have taken that from their results.
I don’t think Michail Antonio is far away from hitting his stride again.
I want Mick to get back on the goalscorer’s sheet, but if you look at us as a Club it’s not a problem because we’re fourth in the Premier League as goals go, so we’ve had other players step up and got goals through different areas in the team.
Any football manager would want them to be shared around different areas, but I do want to get Mick back scoring, back to the levels and last week at Leicester he didn’t get his reward but I’m beginning to see little bits that are giving me encouragement that he’s on his way back. I don’t think it will be too long before he’s back on the scoresheet.
Jarrod Bowen has certainly stepped up.
His goals and assists have been at great, now what we want from Jarrod is that consistency. He’s become a bit more, I think, in control of himself in understanding the all-round situation. His finishing has become very good recently and we talk about confidence – Jarrod’s in a really good vein of confidence right now which is important for forward players.