David Moyes conceded that his West Ham United team had not performed well enough in Sunday's 2-1 Premier League defeat by Crystal Palace.
The Hammers took the lead against the general run of play at a rain-soaked London Stadium when Saïd Benrahma collected a Lucas Paquetá pass and slammed a rising 22-yard shot past Vicente Guaita. However, a defensive mix-up involving Craig Dawson and Thilo Kehrer allowed Wilfried Zaha to level minutes before half-time.
West Ham did improve as the second half wore on, and were denied a penalty on a VAR review by referee Paul Tierney, who ruled Marc Guéhi had not made enough contact on substitute Michail Antonio to warrant the spot-kick he had initially awarded.
Then, in the fourth minute of added time, Antonio's cross straight into Guaita's gloves enabled the Eagles to counter and Michael Olise to curl a shot beyond Łukasz Fabiański, via a deflection off Aaron Cresswell.
Speaking to West Ham TV, Moyes was honest in his assessment of a disappointing day in east London.
We didn’t deserve an awful lot from the game today, we didn’t play well enough.
We’ve lost a game which I hoped we wouldn’t have done, but the way we performed, it probably merited a defeat.
We tried to give as many of the players recovery time and rest time this week to get them ready.
We know it was a hugely important game for us today – we got a goal probably out of nothing and then we gave them a terrible goal just three or four minutes before half-time, which was really, really poor.
It looked as though we might win it in the end, but we made some bad decisions defensively and didn’t make the right choice of pass, which gave them the opportunity.
We hadn’t really deserved to go in front to be honest, but we took it and we hope it would build come confidence and build better play.
But it was a poor bit of play from the back which led to their first goal and then we concede in the 94th minute.
We don’t want soft penalty kicks.
What I heard from our staff was that if it had been given it would have been a soft penalty kick. We don’t want to happen, so If we think everybody has got it right, that’s what it’s [VAR] there for.
Lucas Paquetá come off at the end and that was more a case of cramp [than anything else].
We just wanted to hope that keeping him on, he might have made a moment that could have got us the winning goal.
I thought the football was better in the period [after the substitutes] and we actually looked more likely to score in that period.
Look, Saïd is badly strapped up on his knee and was touch and go for the game. It was about 60 minutes in and I didn’t think he was moving as freely as he could do, but overall we made the choice and I thought the performance got slightly better.
We’ve won a lot of games at home, today is the first defeat in eight.
We want to try and win here in midweek [against Blackburn Rovers in the Carabao Cup third round] and try to win here on Saturday as well [against Leicester City in the Premier League].
