David Moyes has reiterated the need for his West Ham United team to keep building momentum as they head to Leicester City on Sunday.
The trip to King Power Stadium might be the Hammers' final Premier League match of the 2022/23 season, but a UEFA Europa Conference League final against Fiorentina awaits just ten days later.
Having beaten AZ Alkmaar and Leeds United in the run up to this meeting with the Foxes, the manager is keen to keep the side's collective foot to the floor as they seek a third straight win in all competitions.
Here is what the manager told the media in his pre-match press briefing...
I take every game one at a time, that’s all we ever do.
We see a chance to get another league place higher up and we’re all well aware of the value of that in the Premier League.
I think if you’d given me this position a few weeks ago I’d have snapped your hand off, because we don’t go into the last day with any real problems.
More importantly we go into it as well knowing we’ve got a cup final in a week or so’s time.
We want everybody fresh, but we want them all able and prepared [for the final].
We don’t want the gap in time to be too long between the games, so all those things come into our thinking.
Look, we want to keep playing as well as we have done and we’ve improved greatly in the last month or so.
We had a really good victory last weekend, we won in Alkmaar as well and we want to keep that run going if we can.
We have to go and do our job, and our job is to go and get another win.
We have to see if we can finish a bit higher up the league, if we could it would be important for us. And we’re preparing for a final and we need to get everybody in the right condition for that.
I’ve not been sure what to do this week, with not having a midweek game!
I found plenty of things to keep myself occupied with regarding football, but you’re right. We’ve had a midweek game every week since March, nine games in April and every midweek in May as well.
It’s been relentless, and just to have a couple of days’ downtime has been fabulous.
I think this season has been full of surprises.
Whether it’s been one of those seasons with the World Cup coming in and lots of changes, but the teams at the bottom probably weren’t expected to be there.
We’ve seen some sides perform brilliantly well this season and got themselves higher up the league, which has made the bottom half of the league incredibly competitive.
This was always a hard-looking game.
Leicester City have had a great team over recent seasons and I think it’s a bit of a surprise that they’re in the position they are.
Look, we know they’ve got some top players and we’re going to have to defend well and deal with it well. Hopefully we can.
