David Moyes took a considered view of Sunday’s 2-0 home Premier League defeat by Brighton & Hove Albion.
The reverse sent Moyes’ West Ham United side to the bottom of the table, below Manchester United on goal difference, with goals in either half from Alexis Mac Allister and Leandro Trossard condemning the Irons to a third straight defeat to start the 2022/23 season.
After a fairly bright start, the home side conceded midway through the first half when Kurt Zouma lost possession and Danny Welbeck was fouled by full debutant Thilo Kehrer inside the penalty area, and Mac Allister converted from 12 yards.
Then, after another decent showing early in the second half, Trossard put the game beyond Moyes’ men when he finished confidently at the end of a sweeping Brighton move that cut through the heart of the home side.
The Hammers have yet to score a top-flight goal this season and were left frustrated again by the Seagulls, whose goalkeeper Robert Sánchez made two fine saves to deny Tomáš Souček and Jarrod Bowen late on to extend his club’s unbeaten all-time Premier League record against the east Londoners to eleven matches.
Moyes admitted his team have not found their best form so far this season, but is not about to hit the panic button just yet. Instead, he and his coaching staff will go back to Rush Green and work hard to put things right, starting at Aston Villa next Sunday afternoon.
I thought we played OK, but I wouldn't say more than that.
I think everybody will look at it as a really poor performance and in many ways it was but I've got to say, up until the penalty, I didn't think it was a poor performance.
I thought we had done a lot of good things, we pressed them, they had kicked the ball long, we had recovered the ball, we regained it, we got ourselves some opportunities to score.
But with our final pass we turned the ball over, we kept giving it away, we didn’t win it back and we didn't get a few passes. And when they got it off us, they seemed to make a few passes more than more than we did.
The truth is we don't want to just play on the break. We want you to control possession and dominate the game and we work towards that.
But when you’re up against a side who is in good form and in a good mood at the moment, as I said though not many people might have thought it, maybe the first 20 minutes was as well as we played against Brighton in the games I've been in charge at the Club.
So it can change very quickly. But we showed that real lack of quality when we got the ball in the final third, whether it was a cross or whether we were trying to finish or make the right decision, we more than often got it wrong.
We did make a mistake for their first goal.
Kurt comes out with the ball and made a mistake and I think Thilo should not go to ground for the penalty.
And that punished us out of nothing. They had a couple of corners, But I don't think we were heavily under pressure.
We had a couple of corners and breaks as well, but that put the game in a different light and because they're side who have a lot of the ball, that makes it difficult and makes you look at times as if maybe you're not running as hard up to the ball as you should be. You think they can maybe not there.
So, you have to understand the game and know this can happen, especially against a team that’s very good at passing it.
I don't lose three games in a row. me personally, I don't, so I've got to consider that and see how and why that's happened.
I've said it in all the outlets that we are changing and that there's a new team evolving somewhere in here.
They've not been ready yet, a lot of players haven’t been ready. We've lost a lot of players who we thought it was time for that to change.
We buy a centre-half at 30 million and he goes over on his ankle so small things at the moment we feel as if they haven't quite gone for us.
But we will keep going and it will turn but we're going to have to keep working at it.
We will need to be a bit tougher and more rugged than we’ve been to get ourselves back on track.
