David Moyes believes his West Ham United squad are showing signs that they are ready for the challenge of competing at home and abroad in the midst of a busy schedule.
Having already played three games in October, the Hammers face a further ten tests before they break for the FIFA World Cup finals in mid-November.
First up is the return UEFA Europa Conference League Group B match against Anderlecht at London Stadium – just a week after defeating the same opponents by a solitary goal in Brussels – and Moyes wants his team to take another positive step towards the competition’s knockout phase.
Every win you get builds confidence wherever you play.
Whether it comes in the Conference League or the Premier League everything helps, and you’re trying to get a bit of consistency to your play and you results. Thankfully we’ve been getting a few wins recently which has been really good.
We want real competition here, which I think we have at the moment. We’re beginning to get an even stronger group of players who have been doing well. Last year it worked incredibly well for us in the group stages, where we were able to change half the team or so.
When it really got tough was when it got to the likes of the quarter-finals and semis, where we were having to play a lot of the players who were also playing on the Sunday as well. That became tough, but at the moment we have got ourselves in a good position in the group, and we want to maintain it.
I do see us continuing to rotate the squad because I think we’ve got players at different times who can come in.
Sometimes injuries change your thinking because if you have an injury or illness it can make you play other players again. Ideally, if we can try to win the group it would be great, but like I said before if we can qualify for Europe after Christmas again that would be a decent thing done.
Last week’s game game overall was pretty tight.
I felt in the end we probably just about shaded [it and deserved] the victory, but I have to say the game was tight. Our goalkeeper had to make a save in the last minutes or it could easily have been one-each.
I did feel we had enough chances to probably score others, so I think the biggest thing for us is to continue making the chances and see if we can get clean-cut finishes, which would make our job a little easier.
I thought Anderlecht played well, we’ve got a group where Silkeborg have shown their ability to win too, but we’ve got two games at home now where we know if we can win one of them it will probably make us qualify. So we’ve got to try and make that happen.
It can happen that you get off to a slow start, or you have a great start, and it changes around.
We don’t feel as if we started as well as we should have done for whatever reason. We felt we had a good pre-season – although we didn’t feel as if we played well in the games, which was probably a continuation into it.
But, I think we’re getting ourselves together, the new players are all getting more acquainted with us and understanding what we want. We’re understanding them too and I think we’re beginning to get some results. Hopefully that keeps going.
I’ve sensed the belief coming through in training and what I’ve seen there is an awful lot of things where I’m saying: ‘This is looking good and going in the right direction’. I’m hoping I’m right in what I’m observing.
We’ve won five out of our last six, and I think that goes [under the radar] a bit.
Maybe we are on a charge at the moment and maybe you’ll only pick up on it further down the line because it’s difficult to accept when you’ve not started the season so well.
We’re beginning to go in the right direction, we’re seeing signs of the new players doing really well. We’re seeing better signs of the players who have done so well for the last two years just beginning to find a little bit of form, whether it be goals or their general play.
We missed Daws for the first month of the season, we brought Nayef Aguerd in who has been injured from the start, so there are one or two things that didn’t quite go the way we wanted, but hopefully we’re back on course now.
We might have played as many European games as any club these last two years.
So from that point of view, West Ham, who didn’t have European football for such a long time – sometimes you mustn’t forget what we’ve got and you have to embrace and enjoy it.
I’m saying Thursday-Sunday isn’t easy – whatever club that’s in it in Europe has a problem with that fixture list – but for West Ham it’s a great thing and we shouldn’t take it for granted because it might not always be there.
But I see us now saying: ‘Come on, we started at the back of the pack, we’ve got a lot of horses to pass on the way going forward, let’s start picking them off and see if we can get back to that position’.
At the time when we lost Angelo [to injury] last season, we were in the top two or three in the league.
Angelo was in great form playing alongside Kurt, and probably if we’re honest, we were maybe in our best form in that period.
It was maybe once we lost Angelo that it started to dip a little bit in certain ways. He gave us left-sided balance at the time and it just didn’t feel quite as good after.
Look, it’s a big injury to come back from for any player, but when you’re 33, 34 as he is now, it’s even tougher. He’s doing really well, he’s been on course, his schedule is pretty good and I think he can still go again.
He’s still probably got a little bit more to go, he’s probably trying to play his way into it a little bit, but fortunately these games have helped a little bit.
It’s better these games than U21s games and we’re trying to get him ready to participate for the first team in all the games.
I’ve been impressed by Gianluca Scamacca since day one.
I think in the first press conference I came in and said I’ve seen things and I hope what I’m seeing is correct!
Some of the stuff he’s done is really good. He then picked up a virus and wasn’t in a physical enough condition – the way the contract talks went on took a long time and he missed a lot of days’ training, so it took us a little bit of time to get him going.
I think it’s going to take a lot longer too to see the real best of him, but the version we’ve got of him at the moment is doing a really good job. We like him, he probably had two headers on Sunday, the shot past the post and he scores one as well, so on the day he could have maybe had two or three. I just hope he keeps getting those opportunities and those chances.
I think the No8 position is probably where Manuel Lanzini is a better player now.
If you remember when we played Burnley a couple of years ago, we played him there and he played really well. I think Declan was out and he played alongside Tomáš that night as a central midfield player.
I actually think that’s where he’s probably best, playing a little bit behind the ball rather than ahead of it.
I’d still play him in both positions, but I see him helping us build the play a little bit better from deeper now. He’s been great for the Club, he’s been really good for me in my time here and I really like him as a player.
We’ve got lots of competition for places and we need him to come up with some goals for us and creating some assists as well.
