David Moyes was delighted to end 2021 with a comprehensive 4-1 victory over Watford on Tuesday.
The Hammers have struggled for form in recent weeks, and were defeated by Southampton on Boxing Day, but they responded impressively to falling behind to Emmanuel Dennis’ sweetly-struck goal early at Vicarage Road.
Tomáš Souček and Saïd Benrahma scored before the break to turn the game around, before Mark Noble and Nikola Vlašić added the second half gloss.
While Moyes felt his side could perhaps have played even better, he was happy to see signs of their confidence returning.
I’m pleased with how we’ve bounced back today.
It was a good result after the disappointment against Southampton. Overall we deserved to win – we didn’t play as well as we have done at times, but we just tried to build back a little bit of confidence back.
We were depleted today, without Dec, Angelo, Kurt, Cressy and Pablo, so It was good to score four goals.
Mark Noble had his chance with Declan Rice suspended and he played very well.
It’s a good thing that Mark is so experienced and he can have games which really suit him.
The one thing is he certainly knows how to play football. Age can catch up with you in your legs at times which is a pity, but overall I think he was as good as anyone on the pitch today.
There were two assists for Jarrod Bowen and he’s been really important for us.
Jarrod has been one of the players who has kept up a more consistent level to his performances.
We’re trying to get the players back to that and we probably weren’t at our level today but we did a good job against a Watford side who gave Chelsea a close game here not so long ago. It’s not an easy game.
We can look back on 2021 as a good year and we want more in 2022.
We’ve had a great year and it started picking up really last January. We had signs of it in the first part of the season, but it was in the second part that we had the wins, we were challenging for Europe and could we make it?
Everybody knows we did in the end and when we came back, the boys showed in pre-season, and then took it into the league, that they’ve done a lot of good things.
There are buts to come and we will have blips – we’re in the middle of one and we’re trying to find ways when we’re not playing so well to pick up as many points as we can.
We’ve got to try to get a bit more rhythm to our game, it wasn’t quite there today but we did enough to score four and we could possibly have had more.