David Moyes wants to use West Ham United’s European campaign as a springboard to a successful end to the 2022/23 season.
The Hammers resume their continental journey on Thursday, a little over four months since becoming the first team to register a perfect six group wins from six in the UEFA Europa Conference League.
Those home and away victories against Silkeborg, Anderlecht and FCSB set up a round of 16 tie against Cypriot side AEK Larnaca and gives the Hammers a shot at reaching a second straight quarter-final in European competition.
Moyes is taking nothing for granted, however, and will have his team focused on the task at hand on the Mediterranean island.
We’re really looking forward to the game in Larnaca.
It’s a big opportunity and great that we’re at this stage of the competition. We know that to get through would be another big achievement – to get to a quarter final for a second consecutive year would be huge for us from where we’ve been in the past.
We’re looking forward to the game and not for a minute do I underestimate it or take any of it for granted because I think we’ve got a tough game on our hands and we’ve been relaying that to the players.
I’d love to win the competition, I’d love to get to the final. I’d love to keep progressing West Ham in Europe.
We had a pretty good go at it in our first time last year [when we reached the UEFA Europa League semi-finals] and we’ve tried to have a go in a different competition this year and we think we’ve got every chance.
We think that on our day we’ll be a match for any side, but we also know that on their day any side could get through because it’s just the way European football is, you never know exactly how it’s going to go.
To try and win any trophy being a football manager – or a football player – there are very few who get that big opportunity to do so.
José Mourinho showed how much it meant to him, winning the Conference League with Roma last season, because he is a serial winner and he saw winning this competition, any competition on the European stage [is huge].
It was really important to us last year, we wanted desperately to win the Europa League, but we couldn’t quite get past the semi-final. We’ve got a job to do to reach the quarter-final at the moment, but I think it would be a great achievement if West Ham are talked about as being in two quarter-finals in European competitions back-to-back.
Defeats [like Saturday’s at Brighton] are never a good thing, but our results in the main since the World Cup have probably gone steadily up the way rather than down the way.
I think that the game at Old Trafford took an awful lot out of us. It went down to the wire and the score wasn’t quite correct in the end.
It was always going to be a tough game at Brighton and it proved to be the case. Now you’ve got to move on and you always get another opportunity in football.
The opportunities come very quick – we’ve got a great one here, playing home and away to try and get to another quarter-final. That’s the motivation, that’s the drive, whatever’s just happened has gone now and we’re certainly focusing on the next job, which is Larnaca.
Thursday-Sunday is something we’ve been doing for most of last season and we know that Thursday-Sunday football is never a brilliant situation, but I’ll tell you what, all the clubs in the top half of the Premier League are desperate to get into these competitions.
We’re the same, we want to stay in it, I want to go as far as I can and win it if possible. We’ve started well in this competition and we want to keep it going.
We’ve blooded a lot of young players in Europe – in Bucharest, who did really well, and we had boys who played against Dinamo Zagreb last season too.
We’ve tried to give the young boys opportunities in the earlier games, I think when you get to the knockout stages, you don’t have so many opportunities to recover if the game doesn’t go so well.
We’ve got a squad of first-team players which we put together knowing we had Europe in mind in the first place, knowing that last year we might just have been a little bit short of the level.
We have a squad of players who can compete in this competition and hopefully be ready for the Premier League games.
With what we need to do, and we’ve got another game on Sunday, it gives me a chance to look at what we’ve got and see which players are ready. It also gives some players big opportunities to show exactly what they can do.
I’m expecting an incredibly tough game from a [Larnaca] side who I feel have got good momentum in their league.
They’ve got an experienced team, they’ve also got a team who have played a lot in Europe – they started this season in the Champions League, went into the Europa League and now find themselves in the Conference League, all in the same season.
So from that point of view I think they’re a side who have some experience in these competitions and in football you never know.
I’m going into the game as if we were playing any other team. We’ve had to play a lot of really good teams from various countries, so we’ll treat this exactly the same as we’ve treated the other games.
We’ve had some brilliant results in Europe this year, some really good performances and a little bit to hang on to.
It’s given us a little confidence, some of the games we’ve had and how the team has played. So we’ll try to take that into this game and move on quickly from Brighton.
We had a really good result against Nottingham Forest, we didn’t have a good one against Brighton – that’s a little bit the way we are at the moment. We need to get a little more consistency and be a bit more steady all round.
Look, if we can keep up the form we’ve had in Europe that would be great. We’re going to go into the game with that mindset to try and do it again, also with the knowledge that we’ve got a second leg to play at home, which we’d try to use to our advantage.
