David Moyes was happy with his West Ham United team’s overall performance, even if he was disappointed with the final result in Wednesday’s 1-0 Premier League defeat at Liverpool.
The Irons were edged out by a single goal at Anfield for the fourth season in succession, despite a determined performance against the Reds, who secured victory through Darwin Núñez’s first-half header.
West Ham momentarily lost shape, with Núñez hitting the post moments after scoring, did not lose heart after falling behind and had opportunities to equalise, most notably when Jarrod Bowen saw his penalty saved by Alisson just before half-time, and when Tomáš Souček’s late shot was kept out by a combination of James Milner and his goalkeeper.
With Flynn Downes impressive on his full Premier League debut in midfield in the absence of the injured Lucas Paquetá – out with a shoulder problem suffered at Southampton on Sunday – and Declan Rice repeatedly driving West Ham up the pitch, Moyes felt his team could have got a share of the spoils, rather than left Merseyside with nothing.
It's been like that for a few weeks, when we've not quite looked as if we're being ruthless enough to score and really take the opportunities.
We had the same at Southampton. I think our play has been very good and some of our football is getting better and we’re enjoying.
So, I'm hoping the good performances lead to good results. Tonight was a good performance, but we couldn't get anything out of the game.
I was really impressed with the way we took the game to them in the second half.
I didn’t think we played that well in the first half, but I didn’t think we played that badly. I think we probably just didn't quite set up as well as we'd like with what we tried to do.
Also, you’re coming to Anfield and facing a team who has just beaten Manchester City at the weekend, so those are the reasons why maybe they started a bit better than us, but I didn't feel really as if we were ever out of the game. It's just that we kept giving the ball terribly in the first 20 minutes, so we continually giving them the ball back, which meant that when almost had to give up getting to them because we didn't look after the ball well enough.
But I thought in the second half we passed it much better and we put on a better show than we had done in the first half.
I don't think that the long delay before taking the penalty affected Jarrod.
It shouldn't do and if it did, then it was wrong. He shouldn't have been, but I fancied Jarrod, I really did, so I’m just disappointed he didn’t score.
Flynn did well, he played really well. He's coming on and I like him and I think there's good signs from him coming.
I've had quite a lot of boys from the Championship in my time and some of them have had to wait six months and to make the team at different times and we are trying to ask a boy from the Championship to break into a side which is in the top six in the Premier League, so that's not an easy thing to do.
Lucas has got a bit of a shoulder injury.
We’ve got no timescale that we’re going to put on it at the moment.
I think the performances are beginning to get more like what we want.
I thought Declan Rice was probably the best player on the pitch tonight so, from that point of view, we're beginning to get more back to some of the levels.
Even some of the performances from Tomas and others were better, and there's bits of the play where the boys are getting a little bit better, so let's hope we can keep improving.
