David Moyes made it clear that West Ham United must improve their away form when they travel to Brighton & Hove Albion on Saturday.
The Hammers have picked up one away win in the league this season and have not tasted three points on their Premier League travels since Aston Villa in August last year.
A Premier League victory over Brighton & Hove Albion at the 12th attempt would see the Hammers record consecutive league wins for the first time since home wins over Fulham and Wolverhampton Wanderers in October.
And ahead of the trip to the Amex Stadium, Moyes spoke about what he expects from Brighton, building on the win against Nottingham Forest, and breaking the Premier League duck against the Seagulls.
I can take a lot of positives from [the performance against Manchester United].
I said at the time, and I still feel the same that we are a bit disappointed. We had a huge opportunity to get through in the FA Cup and we didn’t quite make it.
We were poor in the late part of the game at Old Trafford.
In recent weeks we got a clean sheet against Nottingham Forest, and we have defended well. For most parts of the season it has been one of our strongest areas, but I totally agree it has to be better than the last five or ten minutes [against Manchester United]. They were not good.
For most of the game, we put on a good show, but there’s no point in turning up and doing it for a period and not fulfilling it to the end.
I used to use the word flaky here at West Ham, and I got rid of it to be honest, because we’ve not been that for the last couple of years – but we certainly were that for the last 15 minutes at Old Trafford, so we were disappointed with the last 15 minutes from that point of view. That’s not the way my teams play and that’s what I said after the game.
Brighton has been a bit of a bogey team for us, so we have to overcome it, and we have to change that if we can.
Our away form this year has been disappointing but recently we have just had a draw away to Newcastle and a draw at Leeds United just prior to that, so we have got to find a way of picking up points on the road and we will try to do that again this weekend.
We played [the 4-3-3] earlier this season and we couldn’t get results, so we had to make some changes.
We changed to see if we could get ourselves steady and win a few games, but I have to say we are coming through a period where we played three at the back and will continue to chop and change for the games where we feel we need to.
We have tried to find a way of scoring more goals.
That might be the difference with new players coming, the systems can work sometimes and sometimes they don’t. In recent weeks, we have played a system that has got us some results so let’s hope that continues.
I always talk about the Red Bull model and how well they’ve done over the years.
Brighton have now been at it for ten years maybe and you can see the players they’ve brought in have been younger. They’ve been willing to go out and look to buy young players who maybe aren’t ready and give them a few years to put them in the team.
They’ve got so many young players coming through now so all credit to Brighton & Hove Albion Football Club and how they’ve done it.
It’s not everybody who does it in the same way, but how Brighton are doing it, they’re doing a very good job.
Roberto De Zerbi has adapted very well.
I think Brighton has tended to choose very well, whether that’s been, players or managers. The choice of Graham Potter, and certainly now the choice of the new manager has been very good. He’s fitted in well and has had a good start, but longevity in the Premier League is not easy to come by, so you have to keep on ploughing out the wins and getting results. There’s always difficult times in the Premier League there’s never just one way.
It's always not an easy thing when you play Thursday-Sunday football.
I don’t think the Premier League has helped us put this game on a Saturday because it means we’ve played Wednesday-Saturday and I think that could easily have been helped.
But we take it, we turn up and play, and we’ll be playing Thursday-Sundays which we’re looking forward to because being in Europe is a big, big thing.
