David Moyes has called on his West Ham United team to get their Premier League season up and running when Brighton & Hove Albion visit London Stadium on Sunday.
The Hammers have yet to register a point or a goal in the opening two top-flight matches, losing to champions Manchester City and newly promoted Nottingham Forest, albeit Moyes’ men were unfortunate not to get at least a share of the spoils at the City Ground last weekend.
However, a 3-1 UEFA Europa Conference League play-off round first-leg win over Danish side Viborg FF on Thursday night, featuring goals from new boy Gianluca Scamacca, Jarrod Bowen and Michail Antonio, the return from long-term injury of Angelo Ogbonna and an eye-catching performance from Maxwel Cornet, have instilled much-needed confidence in the east Londoners.
And manager Moyes told the media at his pre-match press conference that he wants the Irons to take that positivity into Sunday’s meeting with the Seagulls and start climbing the Premier League table…
I took out of Thursday night against Viborg three pretty good goals.
I took Micky getting a goal and getting back in his goalscoring form and obviously Gianluca and Jarrod getting back in the goals as well.
These games can be easy, or they can look easy on paper, but they’re much harder to play and you can slip up quite easily, I should say, because you've seen it happen before, so it was a tough game, but we got there in the end.
Just obviously get getting the first game and the first win and some of the players having their first match was really important.
Angelo, for example, we probably might not have pushed him so quickly with other people available, but we've given him a chance to get back in and he's done well, so hopefully he’ll not be too far away.
Getting Gianluca in, Maxwel minutes as well was good too, so I’m pleased for them.
I think, in time, Gianluca will have an impact on the Premier League.
I think if we're going to judge him very quickly then I don't think that's fair. I think we will be trying to bring him into the Premier League gradually, and we will look to do that as we go along.
He’ll get to know us better and we'll get to know him, but we've seen enough from him already to suggest that he's got a lot of things going for him and hopefully he will help us.
I don't think we've got any fresh injury news from Thursday night.
We would be hoping to try and get people back. That's what we’ll do with a few people injured at the moment, so we hope to get them back and, be as strong as we possibly can for this game against Brighton.
Craig Dawson is not too far away now.
I've got loads of teams like Brighton who I’ve found hard to beat, so it's not just Brighton, there are other teams as well like that.
The challenge is good. From their point of view, they've got a good team, they’ve got a manager who's doing very well, they've got a structure which they developed, so they've got a lot of good things going for them, Brighton.
We finished above them last year in the league, so we have to go and try and show that we are good enough and we aim to try and do that again. We've had tough games against them, so I've got no doubt this will be another tough game.
We've seen a few players but we're still looking and we're still trying to add to it.
We've done a lot of bidding for players, but not quite always got them, but we've been active in the market, that's for sure.
I wouldn't talk about players that are at other clubs until they became my players.
We’d like somebody in that left-back area to help Cressy and give us some more cover there as we've not had it. But I wouldn't talk about any individual players from any other clubs.
It’s really important we get our first points on the board, really important.
We don't want to get in a position where we're too far behind where we don't want to challenge.
Our aim is to keep going. We want to be challenging the boys at the top and we know that we've got to get off the mark and get started, so let's hope we can do it on Sunday.
