David Moyes is eager to keep West Ham United’s recent good home form going when Aston Villa visit London Stadium on Sunday.
Villa’s trip to east London will be just the fourth time in 2023 that the Hammers have played on home soil, with ten away days separating the scattered home fixtures.
Having claimed seven points from three games at London Stadium this year - with wins over Everton and Nottingham Forest sandwiching a draw against Chelsea – Moyes knows his team have the quality to keep their good run at home going.
Preparing for this weekend’s game after Thursday’s UEFA Europa Conference League round of 16 first leg win away to AEK Larnaca, the match against Villa marks the start of a run of four consecutive home matches for the Hammers, and the boss knows how crucial these fixtures will be to progressing further in Europe and pushing up the Premier League table.
Villa, under the guidance of experienced Spaniard Unai Emery, will be a challenging test for West Ham, but the Irons are seeking a sixth consecutive win over Sunday’s opponents…
I’m really pleased with how we did against AEK Larnaca.
It was a really good result for us, and an important result. It’ll not make that second game any easier, and we’ll need to concentrate and make sure we get through, but it would be a great achievement if we can make the quarter finals of a European competition for a second year in the row.
I’m really pleased for Michail Antonio getting his goals.
The team needed those goals and our result was good, and in the cup competitions it is the result that really matters.
We’re really enjoying having European football back.
We’re nine games unbeaten now in Europe this season, which has been fabulous for us. We want to try and go at least a stage further than we did last year in Europe, when we got to the semi-final, but we have to take it one game at a time and work to try and get into the quarter-final to start with.
The loss at Brighton & Hove Albion was a poor result.
I felt that we didn’t play well but, the week before, we had a great result at home against Nottingham Forest. We want the fans to get right behind the team and support us as well as you have done. I hope they can keep it going.
I think the confidence levels are fine in our players.
We’re coming back from a good win in midweek, and we won our last home game. We also drew with Chelsea in the one before that and beat Everton before that too, so we’re back at home for only our fourth home game out of 14 this year. But we’re looking forward to it.
It’s consistency from the team. That is what we’re after. We want consistency in that we play well and we keep the standards up like we have over the last two or three years. The whole team, we all need to look for better consistency.
To get a positive result this weekend, we need to play as well as we have done in our recent other home games.
Our home form seems to be much better than our away form at the moment, but hopefully we can keep that going. We’ve got a chunk of home games coming up in the weeks to come. Aston Villa is our next game and we need to focus on that.
We go into this game as we do for each game every week.
We prepare our players for every game and we try to make sure they’re given the right information and advice. We ask them to go out and perform - and we hope they do that.
Aston Villa have got a very experienced manager in Unai Emery.
He has got a great record in Europe and was also here before with Arsenal, so he will know the Premier League very well.
He’s at a good club in Aston Villa and I would expect them to continue to improve. They’ve spent some money on good players over the years and it will be a tough game for us.
