West Ham United is a happy Club to be a part of – and with good reason.
On Sunday afternoon, David Moyes’ Irons completed a run of seven games in 22 days – five of which ended in wins, as well as a draw and a penalty shoot-out victory – with an outstanding performance in a 3-2 win over title-chasing Liverpool.
If fatigue amongst the Irons were anticipated, there have simply been no signs of it, the Irons grafting to go in level at half-time as the visitors dominated possession in the first half, before exemplifying precision, commitment and quality in the second to defeat the Reds for the first time since January 2016.
All of those qualities, once more, were displayed by Jarrod Bowen, who picked up his third and fourth assists in his last seven Premier League games by setting up Pablo Fornals and Kurt Zouma for the goals which saw West Ham past their opponents.
Reflecting on the Irons’ sensational run, Bowen spoke to West Ham TV about his joy at being a West Ham United player in these most exciting of times…
It’s all about momentum.
I think we’ve spoken about the run of games. We’ve had so many in quick succession that when we have those games, we keep winning and keep performing because the momentum we carry through and the confidence is high, so we look forward to going into every game.
Now we’ve got international break coming up, I’m sure we’d love to be playing in three days again! But now it’s about looking back, evaluating the games and just giving ourselves credit for where we are right now in the league and how well we’re doing in Europe as well.
I said the other day that this Club is just a joy to be at at the minute and everyone’s loving it, and you can see on the pitch how much it means to us and how much we’re working for each other.
I think in the second half we were much better – in the first half it was hard.
We knew it was going to be hard against Liverpool. They keep the ball and they’re relentless when they do. Sometimes, when you win the ball back, you’re so tired from defending it’s hard to keep the ball and keep your concentration, but that always happens, especially when you’re playing against a team like Liverpool.
With a bit of composure in the second half, we created a lot of chances. I think on another day we might have put some more in the back of the net, but we scored three goals against a very, very good Liverpool team, so we’re obviously delighted with the three points.
I wasn’t as involved in the game as much as I’d like to have been, but I think that was down to the team that we were playing against.
It’s going to be hard to create a lot of chances against a team like them but I got the ball for the second goal and just saw a gap, and just thought “if I keep running with the ball and drawing players to me” – because I feel like that’s what I do as a player, I try and draw as many players as I can – and “if I release it, make sure it’s the right pass”.
Thankfully Joel Matip stepped out, I saw Pablo in behind, I had to try and weight the pass in behind perfectly, I did that and we got the goal from it.
I’m a winger – my job is to score and create goals – and to get two assists today is great for me.
We spend a lot of time on set-pieces.
The gaffer, Kev [Nolan], Nev [Paul Nevin], [Stuart] Pearcey, Bill [McKinlay], all the coaching staff… we put so much detail into our set-pieces and I think we’ve scored a lot of goals off of them. It’s not a fluke, the amount we’ve scored.
Some games can be decided on set-pieces and we’ve had two goals from them – I’m not sure if the first one is an own-goal, or whatever happened, but it went in – and with Kurt Zouma’s first West Ham goal as well, I’m delighted for him.
At the back end of last season, we finished well. This season was all about building on what we did last season.
To be cemented in the top four going into the November international break, for this Club, is massive. It’s everything for this Club and it’s everything that we want to give these fans.
We’re not there by coincidence – it’s not like we’ve played two games and we’re in the top four – we’re comfortably in there.
We look back on the games we dropped points in [this season] – in hindsight, it’s always easy to look back – but you look at those games where we’ve dropped points and we probably should’ve won those games. We probably should be top of the league going into international break! It’s always easier to look back, but the position we’re in now is unreal.
Now, I’ll have a week off, a little rest, a few days just to get the mind off football – because we’ve played a lot of football in the last three weeks – and we’ll just get ready to go again after international break.
When we won 3-2, you heard the roar around the entire Stadium.
When you’re 3-1 up at home to Liverpool with ten minutes to go, it’s always going to be shaky for, but every single person in this crowd made themselves heard and it helped us get over the line.
They haven’t been here for a year-and-a-half [last season], but this season we’re trying to repay them with good performances and good results. We’re all a part of it.