David Moyes says his West Ham United players will need to up their levels all over the pitch if they are to overturn a first-leg deficit to Eintracht Frankfurt and reach the UEFA Europa League final.
The Hammers were stunned within a minute of their semi-final kicking-off at London Stadium when Ansgar Knauff headed the Germans in front.
West Ham rallied and levelled through Michail Antonio before half-time, only for a second piece of loose marking allowed Daichi Kamada to smuggle Eintract back into the lead shortly after the break.
The Irons maintained a threat throughout, creating 15 goal attempts and hitting the woodwork on three occasions – twice through Jarrod Bowen and once through Saïd Benrahma – but found the target just twice, while Frankfurt turned eight attempts into four shots on target and two goals.
And so the east Londoners go to the Waldstadion with plenty to do to reach the Club’s first major European final since overcoming the same opposition in the European Cup Winners’ Cup final 46 years ago.
But the manager knows his team need to improve markedly in attack and defence to inflict Frankfurt’s first defeat in 14 Europa League ties this season and win through.
We didn’t deserve to win the game tonight.
We didn’t play well enough. I think if you play well, then you can talk that way, but I don’t think we really deserved it.
We didn’t show enough quality, certainly in the attacking areas when we did have those moments, and there were a couple of times when we had to defend and we didn’t defend well enough.
We’re probably going up against teams which might be better than us.
There’s a good chance that they are at this level are, a lot of the teams, so maybe at this level we’re just short of the quality required to make the difference.
We did play well for a fair bit of the first half and I actually thought we were the better team.
I thought they were there for the taking when we got to one-each, but we just couldn’t have the quality to make a cross or make a pass or a good connection to make us a chance to get a second goal.
Tonight was a terrible night for us from set pieces and that didn’t help either.
We will keep going.
We’re only 2-1 down in a two-legged game so we’ll keep going, but we know we really need to up our levels and our standards if we’re going to get through.
The players know that we’re pushing them hard and telling them: ‘You can’t be five per cent off it because if you are and then you don’t make the right decisions and you get caught out, those moments go, and you won’t get loads of moment’
We’re trying to get to a final, so we made too many poor decisions, whether that be with our passing, our finishing or trying to create a goal – there were just too many wrong decisions.
We’ve gone away from home and won before this season and I think we’ll go there and give it a go.
The big risk is that they’re a big counter-attack side which will be a risk to us as well.
