West Ham United manager David Moyes spoke of his great respect for his Nottingham Forest counterpart Steve Cooper ahead of his team’s meeting with the Premier League new boys on Sunday.
Cooper took over the reins at the City Ground early last season, with his team struggling near the foot of the Championship table, but less than twelve months later he will welcome the Hammers to the East Midlands as a top flight club once again, after leading a charge up the division which culminated in a play-off final victory over Huddersfield Town.
The Reds may have lost their season opener to Newcastle United last weekend, but Moyes is expecting a stern test in front of a lively crowd at Forest’s home – and he knows his team must be up for the challenge.
I’ve got big respect for Nottingham Forest’s manager, Steve Cooper.
I think he’s done an incredible job to get Nottingham Forest in the Premier League from where they were last year. You have to give him huge praise for what they’ve done.
I’ve been really impressed with how they’ve gone about their work in the last twelve months or so.
I’m expecting a big challenge.
You only need to look at what Fulham did in their first game up, and what Bournemouth did in their first game as well at home.
They were both at home and both got positive results so we know exactly how difficult it will be going to Nottingham Forest.
I think if you had your choice you’d try not to play against newly-promoted teams in the opening games of the season, but our first away game and Nottingham Forest’s first home game pits us against them.
Nottingham Forest has been a great club over many, many years.
The history connected to Nottingham Forest has been fantastic and I don’t think there will be a football fan in the UK who wouldn’t know the name Brian Clough or Nottingham Forest. Half of us could probably name the team they had in the European finals – they’ve got an incredible footballing history.
It was great that we got Leeds United back in the Premier League a couple of years ago and I think it’s also great that Nottingham Forest are back in the division as well.
My job is to go and beat them and that’s what I’m concentrating on.
I think everybody enjoys the atmospheres and since lockdown everywhere we go it’s incredible.
We had a pre-season friendly at Lens in France, which was an unbelievable atmosphere. The players are all used to it now, they enjoy it and we hope there is [a lively] atmosphere there. We hope it is a noisy ground and we look forward to going and playing there.
It’s important that you get good players in to help you.
We don’t want to just fill the places for the sake of doing do, we’re going to try to add players who we think can make the team better or who can bring some value to the team already.
We’ll try to do that, there’s never any guarantee to it but we’re trying really hard. We’ve made lots of offers but quite often you don’t always get them to go through.
We’re hoping to add players who can make us competitive and we want to try to continue to be around the top of the league, so we’re going for good players. We want quality players if we can get them. Sometimes good quality players have other options or other ideas so you can miss out at times as well.
I’ve got to say the directors and owners here made a great offer to Jesse [Lingard], but the player has his own choice to go wherever he wants.
We pushed the boat out to try and get him, but we didn’t get him. He chose Nottingham Forest, that’s Jesse’s choice and not ours. It’s no failing on the Club that we didn’t get him.
Three players have moved on the last week or so.
Arthur Masuaku has been great for us, but we just felt we wanted him to get more playing time. He didn’t play as much last year so it was an opportunity for him.
It’s the same for Niki Vlašić – we couldn’t guarantee that we would find him a position and a chance to play him, so there was a loan for him.
And Issa felt that he was not going to be involved as much so the decision was taken that we would sell him.
We’re still piecing ourselves together and we'll know better once we get everything in place.
We’re fixing ourselves out at the moment but the aim is always to finish at the top of the league if you can.
We want to challenge and for long parts of last season we were actually in the top four, so we want to continue to push for that if we can. We know we’re going to have to reach really high standards again, we need to get our rhythm back and find the momentum which we’ve had for the last two-and-a-half years.
