David Moyes could not contain his delight after his West Ham United side secured their place in the UEFA Europa League quarter-finals with a dramatic, unforgettable extra-time victory over Sevilla.
The Hammers overturned a 1-0 deficit from the first leg to knock the Spanish six-time Europa League winners out of the competition they have virtually owned over the last 15 years.
After a fast start, superb Alphonse Areola save to deny Youssef En-Nesyri a potentially devastating second for Sevilla and an equally fine stop from Bounou to keep out Michail Antonio's effort, Tomàs Souček drew the impressive Irons level on aggregate with a towering first half header from Antonio's lofted centre.
Sevilla improved in the second half, but it was still the Irons who looked the more likely winners, both in normal time and in the sapping period of extra time that followed, with a raucous, capacity London Stadium crowd willing their team on to glory.
And that moment of glory arrived eight minutes from the end when Andriy Yarmolenko scored the decisive goal, pouncing clinically after Pablo Fornals' initial shot had been parried into his path.
Moyes was rightly immensely proud of his players' efforts, proud of the part the supporters played on a special night and proud of the entire Club as we reached the final eight of a European competition proper for the first time in 41 years...
I just kept my arms in the air after the second goal because I was so pleased and so proud of how the players performed.
I’m really pleased at the crowd, they had to stay [with us] right to the end and we got the goal in the last few minutes, but it was deserved.
It was deserved throughout, we kept at them all night, we never realty really let them away with anything.
We kept the pressure on as much as we could and we mustn’t forget that they are second in La Liga. Atletico Madrid beat Manchester United, Villarreal beat Juventus, so don’t underestimate the quality of the Spanish sides, especially Sevilla who continually win this competition and are really difficult to play against.
We set the tone early – I thought the opening 20 minutes was as good as we’ve played.
That period came without any end product or chances, but then Mick had a really good chance and there were moments when we didn’t do the final moment well, and I’ve been calling out for better quality – then we stood up a ball to the back post and Tomáš came and heads one in, which was a brilliant goal.
That got our foot in the door and said it was game on. I thought they came back into it in the second half of the first half and we had to say to ourselves, ‘Look we’re in a really good position here, we can try to go on and get something’.
We were really close to winning it in normal time as well.
I said to them when they came in at half-time: ‘I think we’ve got this lads’.
I thought they were going to give us a chance and it was whether when the chance came could we take it, because it had just started to look like we weren’t going to score one of them.
So it was great that Yarma came up with the winning goal.
Yarma has handled things with great dignity.
It must be incredibly difficult for him, and once again hopefully the world will see a Ukrainian footballer doing well in Europe – it will be all around Europe and from that point of view hopefully the message is getting to everybody that we don’t want this war and we want Russia to stop.
It was a great atmosphere tonight.
Big thanks to all the supporters and we needed it. There was a little spell where we lost a bit of control after 70-75 minutes when we just ran out of energy a little bit, and we needed the supporters then to really get behind the team. We got through to 90 minutes and I thought we looked like the stronger team in 90 minutes and were the more likely to score.
It was just a matter of us getting that goal.
I wish we could have got the trophy tonight!
There are four games to play to get to the final, but we’ve got a good team and as long as we’re right – I’ll be telling the players tomorrow that they’ve all got to avoid injuries and keep themselves in top condition, because we have a small squad and we need Jarrod back, we need the boys back for the big games to come.
