David Moyes was thrilled to see his West Ham United claim a memorable 1-0 Premier League victory over Manchester United on Sunday night – and felt his team’s performance deserved it.
Saïd Benrahma’s first-half goal secured a crucial three points for the Hammers, taking the east Londoners seven points clear of the drop zone and giving the team the perfect boost ahead of Thursday’s UEFA Europa Conference League semi-final first leg against AZ Alkmaar.
While the No22’s strike owed much to David de Gea’s sloppy attempt to keep it out, the team created openings throughout and were unfortunate not to add to that strike, with both Michail Antonio and Tomáš Souček having efforts ruled out and the Irons having at least one decent shout for a penalty turned down.
As it turned out, after a resolute defensive performance led by goalkeeper Łukasz Fabiański and right-back Thilo Kehrer, among others, one goal was enough to lift the roof off east London and have the Hammers looking forward to the remaining month of the campaign with relish.
We went through the emotions – and we thoroughly deserved to get a second goal.
Whether it would have been through a penalty, or some of the shots we had, or the goal that was disallowed, I thought we warranted, and played well enough to get, a second goal tonight.
But while we couldn’t, it was a case of what we did at the other end – could we keep them out? And thankfully we did tonight.
We needed a top performance and tonight I felt we were getting much closer to it.
We were better with the ball, harder working, more compact when we needed to be because we played a really good team tonight and we'll play another one on Thursday in AZ, as you don’t play bad teams in European semi-finals either. Everyone’s got to be ready to help us get to a final.
You have to get the shots on target.
If he (Saïd Benrahma) gets them on target we might score. We needed that bit of fortune and let’s be fair, we’ve not had much fortune with refereeing decisions recently, and I have to say we’re probably due a couple of penalty kicks in the coming games with the way things have been going.
We played with a bit of pomp tonight.
Of course there were periods when we couldn’t have the ball because they were so good with it, but we had bits but Michail Antonio was a threat.
When he got hold of it we looked as though we were ready to break. Declan was excellent in midfield, getting up onto the second balls and getting the game started for us.
Lucas Paquetá at the moment is giving us lots of bits of magic to get us out of trouble. There were a couple of chances where I thought he could have played better passes through, but lots of good things today.
We’ve had a problem all year with the defensive organisation, structure, injuries, people leaving, and Nayef and Thilo finding their way.
But I thought they were very good tonight and the goalkeeper has been fabulous too.
Sometimes in a game like this, subs can’t get up to the speed when they come on.
So my feeling tonight was to wait a bit longer and then attempt to shore it up when we needed to late on, try to waste a bit of time with it. Thankfully we did that.
Maybe Sunday night football is the way forward for us here!
I have to say the crowd were brilliant tonight, but I’ve also got to say I also thought the crowd fed off how good the players played – their performance, their energy, their character to try and win the ball and fight for everything was noticeable.
They never gave up, they kept at it and had to dig in at times.
