David Moyes spoke about the importance of competition for places as his players get set for their third UEFA Europa Conference League Group B test at RSC Anderlecht on Thursday night.
The Hammers boss made three changes to his side for Saturday’s success against Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Premier League, and hailed the impact of those players he brought in as they secured a 2-0 victory thanks to goals from Gianluca Scamacca and Jarrod Bowen.
Getting contributions from all corners of his squad will be central to his ambitions of driving forward both domestically and in Europe - where they have a perfect group stage record of two wins from two - and he is sure to turn to other members at Lotto Park on Thursday too.
One player who will not be involved, though, is Maxwel Cornet, who suffered an unfortunate calf injury while doing his defensive duty against Wolves, and the manager addressed the team news, Thursday’s opposition and more in his pre-match press briefing...
Everybody has travelled except for Maxi Cornet, who has a little bit of a calf strain.
We don’t know how long it’ll keep him out for the moment – we don’t think it’s too severe but he hasn’t travelled.
It’s difficult for him because we want to get him up to speed and he didn’t have many pre-season games so we’re trying to edge him towards it. He’s actually had a contribution in quite a few of our games recently and these are the sort of games where we’re talking about a chance to give these boys an opening, but we haven’t got him for this one.
We’re away from home in Europe and it’s an incredibly difficult thing to do to come away and get results.
Anderlecht are a proud football team and they will want to win as well. They’ll see it as a chance to win and get above us in the group.
We have them this week and next week, so we’re going to play each other twice very quickly and at the moment both us and Anderlecht have the most points.
It’s important and we’d like to win the group if we could. For me, like I said last year, if we qualify and have European football after Christmas it will be a real bonus for us once again.
What we wanted this season was a stronger squad of players, where we could come to Europe and play a really strong team.
To be fair, we made a pretty good go of it last year in the group stages. We probably ran out of steam a little bit in the latter stages, and it wasn’t that we ran out of steam in the European games, but we ran out of steam when we came back to the Premier League games.
I have to find a way of trying to manage that a little better. We’ve been a little bit short due to injuries this year, but we’ve just about got all the players back fit now. Obviously we’ve got Cornet out, we’re still nursing Angelo [Ogbonna] a little bit too, but in the main we’ve got a full squad and that gives me options to change, it gives me competition and on Saturday I felt we had to do something a little better, and I think it was better.
I have to say that doing well in the Premier League is always so important.
But what you do when you do well in the Premier League is that it gets you in Europe and everybody is really thrilled if you can make Europe. Especially West Ham, for us to be in Europe two years in a row is fantastic and we’re really enjoying it.
Last year we had a brilliant run, something we really enjoyed. The focus will always be to make sure you’re a sound, competitive Premier League team, but I think if you have a squad big enough and capable enough to deal with all the cup competitions I’m going to try to do that. I have always done that and will do that again in this competition.
We’ve brought Ollie Scarles with us here, who is 16.
He will be involved and I do know that Anderlecht have a couple of 16 to 18-year-old players too. So it’s a great thing that young players get opportunities and some of them will play.
We used a lot last year and we have a new group with the U23s now, and we’re trying to promote the younger ones even sooner if we think they’re doing well. And Ollie is doing really well.
I was extremely relieved to get that result against Wolves at the weekend.
You look at what happened to the manager at Wolves, which was very unfortunate. I’m not saying there’s no difference between my position at West Ham compared to his at Wolves, but certainly our league positions weren’t much different.
Behind our Club I’ve had great support from the owners and everybody behind it, so we think that we’re building something, trying something and trying to make West Ham a consistent team in the Premier League.
That isn’t an easy thing to do, but we’re trying to make a good fist of it.
Declan Rice is a great ambassador for himself and West Ham.
He speaks so well for a boy who is so young. You talk about being a leader and part of being a leader is doing that, standing up and showing what your worth is.
I do think he learns an awful lot when he goes away with England. They have got a fantastic manager, some really top players and I think because of that it gives him a chance to see how the top people work and manoeuvre.
He’s learning an awful lot from it and I think now, a lot of people are looking at Dec as one of the main boys for England, probably after Harry Kane, he’s arguably England’s most important player nowadays and it shows you how well he’s done in a short period of time.
Flynn Downes has come from the Championship and he’s needed time.
People might say ‘what about Jarrod Bowen?’, but it’s different because Jarrod joined us when we were a team trying to avoid being in the bottom three, and Flynn has joined a team who is trying to be in the top half of the league.
We’ve changed from that point of view, so he’ll need to wait for his opportunities and what I will say is that I think he’s trained much better in the past two or three weeks and we’re certainly seeing a bit more from him than when he first came in.
Maybe he’s recognising, 'hey I’ve got to step up as well and going to have to move up if I’m going to join these boys here'.
