The result was all that mattered in the end for West Ham United and David Moyes at Kidderminster Harriers on Saturday.
The Hammers were below their best in the Emirates FA Cup fourth round tie and trailed to Alex Penny’s 19th minute goal for the vast majority of the Aggborough contest.
They needed a wonderful stoppage time goal from Declan Rice to take the tie to extra-time, before Jarrod Bowen struck right at the end of the additional 30 minutes to secure a 2-1 win.
It was a closer-run encounter than Moyes would have wanted, but he was happy to progress to the competition’s last 16.
It was difficult, not our best, but we’re thankful that we’re through to the next round.
We kept going and got a little bit better at times and created one or two more chances but it looked as though it wasn’t going to be our day.
In truth I think Kidderminster deserved the opportunity to take it to penalty kicks.
We lost a poor first goal, which gave them a lift up and meant we had to chase things a bit more.
We found a lot of things difficult today – but we never use it as an excuse because all the players would be used to it.
Nearly all the team we had playing today had been the players playing in the European games, so I saw it as not a big problem that they were coming here to play in the cup tie.
We needed somebody special.
Declan is special and he made the difference, because we couldn’t make the difference with what we had. It was a great goal.
I’ve been on the other side as well and when you get these opportunities you want to showcase yourself.
Kidderminster were excellent today, they prepared well for us. They’ve had games when we haven’t so we should have come into it as the fresher team but they looked more ready for the whole situation.
They worked hard for it, carried a bit of luck which you need, but in the end we just got there.
But we won’t get very far if we play like that too often and thankfully we haven’t played like that too often.
Hopefully we don’t do it again.