David Moyes is determined to transition West Ham United’s European form to the Premier League ahead of the Premier League clash with Aston Villa on Sunday.
The Hammers secured a place in the UEFA Europa Conference League group stage with a 6-1 aggregate win over Danish side Viborg FF – but will now turn their attention to the domestic schedule this weekend.
Despite the difficult start to the Premier League campaign, Moyes was confident the Hammers can use the feel-good factor from the team’s European victories to get back to winning ways in the league at Villa Park.
The boss also gave his thoughts on the Europa Conference League draw, which placed the Hammers in Group B with FCSB, RSC Anderlecht and Silkeborg IF, as well as the form of Gianluca Scamacca, who has struck two goals in his first two starts in Claret and Blue…
I’m looking forward to the UEFA Europa Conference League group stage.
I’ve just seen the draw and I think there’s some good teams in it. I think we’ve had quite a difficult draw with our group, but I’m looking forward to it.
Anderlecht might be a bit of a stand-out for us, and we stayed in Silkeborg on Wednesday night, so we know the level of game we’re going to get in Denmark. And we also know that going to Bucharest to play FCSB won’t be easy either. But it’s great to be in it and it will be exciting times once again.
The distances are not too far, and I think it’s really important that the supporters can try and get to the games relatively easily.
I’ve been complaining a little bit about the Thursday-Sunday schedule because we know a bit about the difficulty it can bring, but I’m really pleased we’re back in Europe again. Two years in a row for West Ham to be in Europe is fantastic.
After the journey last year, they’ll be a lot of hope we can do something similar again.
The two qualifiers gave us a chance to see the new boys.
There were a lot of games and all of the clubs will be using their new players, or players who haven’t started yet and need minutes. The play-off for us was really important. We wanted to get through it and be in the group stages so we couldn’t take too many chances.
We went strong in the two games and the players got us the result on Thursday night, which got us through.
Gianluca Scamacca has been knocking on the door for a start.
It’s not just been about getting him ready in terms of fitness, but also getting him ready for Premier League football. It’s a big change and we have to try to look at him and see what the right games are to play him, and when the right opportunity comes around.
We certainly feel like we’ve got somebody who we are looking forward to working with for a long time. We don’t need to rush him, but is he getting ready? Yes, he’s much closer to fitness now.
I sense there are a lot of players who come in and want to have a chance to look at it, and find out exactly how the team play and what we want them to do. That can take a little bit of time as well.
We’re getting people back fit.
I don’t think we’ve picked up any injuries from our midweek encounter so hopefully we’ll all be ready to go again.
Kurt Zouma has had plenty of minutes at the moment. We just felt we wanted to turn his legs over for a little while and get him back out there.
I hope we take a lot of confidence from last night.
There were a lot of good things. We’re getting goalscorers again and scoring is a big thing. There were some good signs, but as I’ve said before, we’re piecing things together and we’ve got a really difficult game with Aston Villa coming up.
The challenge for us is to aim at the top but at the moment, we’ve got a job to do. We’ve got to try and win the next game, which is always the most important thing. We’ll try to do that at Villa.
It’s hugely important we kickstart our season at Villa.
We’ll do everything we can to get started. We want to play well and we want to win. You need good performances to get results and, at the moment, our performances haven’t been good enough to get the results, so we need to up our performance level.
I said a few times we’re beginning to see things improving and hopefully that will continue.
We lost Nayef Aguerd after he came in (due to injury) and we lost Craig Dawson with an injury as well. We’ve not had Angelo Ogbonna ready after his cruciate ligament, so we suddenly found ourselves with makeshift backlines, and I think that has played a big part in it as well.
I think Aston Villa have got a really good side.
I’ve been saying for a few years that I think they’ve bought good players, they’ve got a good team and I really think they’ve got some talented players at the club. I think they will have a good season but we have to try to go there and win on Sunday.
We’ve really tried to be incredibly ambitious all the way through the transfer window.
The Club and all the staff here have really tried to be ambitious and tried to get good players. We think we’ve got that, we really do. We’re trying to just pull it all together and get it all working, but we do think we’ve got some good players. We just need a little bit of grace to get it all going in the one direction.
We’ve brought in a lot of players and I mentioned it last week about why I felt the changes needed to take place. I felt we had to slightly break up what we had and we’re trying to do that. We’re trying to build another good team at the moment.
I’m really pleased with how we’ve brought the Club on.
We’ve really knuckled down, we’ve kept at it and the players have been fantastic. The Club, as well, has grown as well. We’re trying to be one the of the big clubs.
We want to be a big club in the transfer market. We want to be a big club with the amount of supporters we bring to London Stadium. We doing a lot of things really well. Off the pitch, the Club does a lot of brilliant work in the community too.
I think there are a lot of things that are going well but ultimately, the results on the football pitch drive it all. We need to make sure we get those results better.
