West Ham United manager David Moyes gave an honest assessment of his team’s performance in defeat to Brihton & Hove Albion on Saturday.
Goals from Alexis Mac Allister, Joël Veltman, Kaoru Mitoma and Danny Welbeck sent the visitors to a 4-0 defeat, their heaviest of the campaign.
The boss was not happy with the Hammers’ defending at the Amex Stadium, as the Seagulls took advantage of a couple of pieces of lax play from their visitors to secure the points.
While there were opportunities for Jarrod Bowen and Tomáš Souček with the score at 1-0, Moyes was only too aware that Brighton merited their success.
It was a difficult afternoon.
We didn’t start great, but we knew we were going to have to play a slightly different way and we weren’t going to be able to press the ball as much.
Brighton have got a style and we were going to have to concede quite a bit of possession at times. We did and we conceded a really poor goal to give them the lead from a penalty kick.
It was a terrible goal to give away and we should have dealt with the ball, the cross-field pass, and we didn’t.
It got them in front and it made it harder because it meant then when they were having the possession we obviously needed the ball to get a goal.
We did get a couple of chances just after [the first goal] – Jarrod had a good chance, then Tomáš cut one back and we couldn’t quite get on the end of it.
We had a couple of opportunities to equalise, but no doubt we were under pressure from the start and Brighton were much better than we were.
We were still in the game at half-time, so conceding the second from a corner kick so early in the second half was disappointing.
We conceded the first goal from a corner kick in midweek at Manchester United, and the one we’ve conceded today is terrible, how the boy can be stood in space to score.
We work hard on it as you can imagine as we haven’t conceded many from corners this season, so conceding the first two goals – one from a penalty kick and the other from a corner – made all other poor stuff we did look doubly as bad.
Then after that it was too easy for Brighton to add their third and fourth.
We’ve got to try and get back [and get over this defeat].
We won 4-0 last week and today we’ve lost 4-0. Maybe it’s a wee bit of the way we are and the way the league is. We need to improve our away form if we can.
While we’re not doing that we have to keep our home form up, and hopefully we can do that.
