David Moyes was disappointed in the wake of West Ham United’s 2-0 defeat by Brentford on Sunday afternoon.
First-half goals from Bryan Mbeumo and Yoane Wissa were enough to condemn the Hammers to a 12th away top-flight defeat of the season at Gtech Community Stadium and a fourth straight Premier League defeat in meetings with the west Londoners.
A forgettable afternoon was capped when Danny Ings saw a second-half 'goal' ruled out following a VAR review that deemed Divin Mubama had handled when the ball came back off the post, and the manager was unhappy with both the decision and the apparent inconsistency around handball decisions against his team in recent fixtures.
For Moyes though, nine changes showed that the manager had one eye firmly on keeping his key players fresh for Thursday’s UEFA Europa Conference League semi-final second leg at AZ Alkmaar.
The game played out maybe a little bit like how we expected, but I thought we were soft and easy to play against and I didn't like that at all, certainly in the first half.
The first goal took the wind out of our sails, as we weren't doing an awful lot wrong and we were probing them a little bit.
The first goal we gave away was terrible and we gave away a similar one away at Crystal Palace a few weeks ago as well, so I'm really disappointed about that.
The long throws we knew about and we'd done as much preparation and planning on that as we could on Saturday, but we didn't deal with that well enough and obviously we lost the second goal from a long throw.
I found it difficult that neither of the centre-halves eased them into position to deal with the ball. Obviously their stature and size would have made a bit of a difference.
We managed to correct it a bit in the second half at half-time, but it's not easy to get messages on at times. We had worked on it, so it wasn't something we hadn't done. We had looked at it over the last few days, so the players were well-versed in it.
We did get better in the second half, but I still would have liked much more, but ultimately we were chasing it.
If we had got a goal back, then you're saying 'Game on!' and we'd have been in there fighting and scrapping for it, but again a decision didn't go for us today and we're getting a bit fed up with the decisions not going for us at the moment.
If none of us know the rules or their interpretation, you might think we might get a 50/50 shout, but at the moment I can think of the Liverpool one, the penalty we had given against us at Crystal Palace, and then that one here today.
So, you might say we've had course of something and it might have come up for us, but I can't see it, and I see we're on a real bad run of decisions that aren't going in our favour.
I don't really see a great deal of point in speaking to the officials after the game any more.
I used to do it, but I just don't see it. I think the Premier League have come out and classed it as a 'deliberate handball' and that takes some doing for them to do that, so we'll have to see if they backtrack on that.
I think, for them to come out and say that, if anything it's not conclusive it hits his hand. It hits his shoulder if it hits anything, and it's above the sleeve-line which is not classed as a handball.
I don't really know what they expect. They said about the Liverpool one was that Danny Ings flicked it against Thiago and he was too close to the ball. This one comes off the post and they can chalk it off if it's a handball, but it doesn't look conclusive to me anyway. It looks as if it hits his shoulder and not his hand.
I made nine changes because of the fatigue and because we had beaten Man United and we had beaten Alkmaar.
If I'm being honest, if I'm going to keep flogging the same players all the time then I'm going to break them and that's wrong.
We had an injury to Mick [Antonio] today because I'm sure he's been putting in the miles in the games and I just don't want it to be anybody else. That was the risk [I didn't want to take].
The three points against Manchester United gave us a little breathing space. We aren't completely safe yet, but that gave us the opportunity to do it. We'll now go into the semi-final, I'll dust myself down today, get myself back on it tomorrow and we'll go in there hoping to reach the final.
