David Moyes believes his West Ham United squad possess the requisite character to bounce back from the midweek defeat to Newcastle United.
The Hammers travel to Fulham on Saturday looking for three vital points as they aim to steer a path away from the bottom end of the Premier League table.
While the heavy defeat to the Magpies might have stalled the momentum gained from victory over Southampton last weekend, Moyes is keen to get moving in the right direction again when they head to Craven Cottage.
He spoke to the media in his regular pre-match press conference ahead of training on Friday.
We’ll know more about the squad today once we’ve seen the players train.
All the players had was a recovery session yesterday (Thursday) so we’ll get them back together today.
The group of players we have are fantastic lads.
They’re really honest, committed and have done a brilliant job over the last few seasons for us with the way they’ve worked and how the results have gone.
We expect the same from them – it doesn’t change, they haven’t suddenly become bad players. You can make individual mistakes but we have to get past it now.
People said Everton was must not lose and we went and won that one, then people said Forest was must not lose and we went and won that one too.
It was the same for Southampton, so when you’ve put that title on us we’ve stood up to be counted and if you give me that title again [for Fulham] then I hope we can stand up and be counted this time.
Of course I need this [the pressure which comes with the job].
What a job it is. This is why we see Roy Hodgson coming back and he’s 75. Neil Warnock has come back and so many people in the game, the journey they’re on, they continue to stay on it because they have a great love of the game and want to stay in it.
Part of being a football manager is that you don’t always win all the time. Sometimes you have to lose and you have to deal with it. When you lose you have to learn how to bounce back, so we’re looking forward to trying to bounce back in the next game.
A manager’s job is to raise expectations.
I think we’ve raised expectations, and then you have to live with the raised expectations.
We’ve not lived with the raised expectations this year as well as we should have done, and I can totally understand the supporters. No problem at all. Wednesday was a night where we made mistakes and I think they recognised that as well. Any football supporters at the game would have recognised that individual mistakes were the biggest cause towards us losing the game.
The players set really good standards and they have done over the years.
They’ve been really good to me, and I hope in some way that I’ve been good to them as well.
We’ve got to build on it, Aaron Cresswell is a boy who sets really good examples. He learned a lot from Mark Noble, and we’ve got a lot of players here who are telling the others what the expectations are and what we’re trying to do.
We’re really enjoying being in Europe.
It’s a great thing and an achievement to finish seventh last year and sixth the year before to get us into European competitions.
Last year we reached the semi-finals and I hope we can get to a final. But we’ve always got big games, and in the last couple of years we’ve been in strong league positions with no problem at the bottom of the league.
This year we have got a problem at the bottom of the league and that does have an effect on our thinking. The teams who are going to qualify for Europe this year, they’ll find it next year with the Thursday-Sunday schedule. You’ll see the difference with them as well, it’s very difficult to play in Europe in midweek and go back to the Premier League games, so ideally we would get some good results which would make those Thursday games a lot easier to handle.
It was a fantastic night at London Stadium on Thursday.
The young players got to the FA Youth Cup final, which for anybody who has been a footballer will tell you how prestigious it is.
The boys are doing really well and it shows there’s a development programme in place and we hope to build on it, and in fact make it much bigger in the future.
This side of London has great potential with lots of boys and girls who play football and I hope we can continue that.
It’s great for the boys last night and it was great there was a really good crowd here to watch it as well.
Marco Silva won’t be on the touchline on Saturday, but I don’t think that will have a big change on how he prepares.
The managers are getting sent-off a bit more often, for different reasons. Whether they don’t think the refereeing is good enough, or whether we’re too exuberant, whatever it may be.
He’ll probably be upstairs, mic-ed up and can speak to people, so I don’t think it’s a huge problem nowadays and we take the game as it is.
Mitrović has done amazingly for Fulham.
The goals he scored in the Championship last season were incredible and to be fair I think he had a season in the Premier League before that when he didn’t get quite as much, but he hasn’t half gone on [this year] and shown he can do it in the Premier League.
So I think him being suspended will be a huge blow to Fulham and if it was us, we’d be saying it’s a huge blow to us. But it’s more of a question for Marco Silva than it is for me really.
