Moyes: We’ve got to get back to being resilient and hard to play against

David Moyes has called on his squad to rediscover the qualities which helped them enjoy success at home and abroad in each of the previous two seasons.

The resilience and clinical counter-attacking on which so much of West Ham’s recent improvement was based, enabling the Irons to finish sixth and seventh in the Premier League and reach the UEFA Europa League semi-finals have seemingly become harder to come by in 2022/23.

The result has been ten top-flight defeats in 16 matches, with the latest coming at Arsenal on Boxing Day, where Saïd Benrahma’s first-half penalty was cancelled out by second-half strikes from Bukayo Saka, Gabriel Martinelli and Eddie Nketiah.

Moyes and his side might be down, but they are not out, and the Scot has issued a rallying cry ahead of Friday’s final game of the calendar year at home to Brentford.

We didn’t enjoy how it went.

I didn’t really enjoy all the first half because I didn’t like Arsenal having the opportunities, and I wanted us to play better.

We can organise them and get them defensively set up and in the main, over a few years, we’ve been able to do that in a lot of games, and maybe we’ve nicked a win or draw in some games with it and tonight, we’ve put ourselves in a position to do that.

But we defended really poorly and made big mistakes in the second half. And also, we’ve got really unfortunate the first goal. The boy comes inside and he should have never been allowed the chance because we had a chance to break on them, then Ødegaard gets a chance to come inside and shoot and it just all felt too easy.

We wanted to keep the ball better but at the moment, they’re smothering everybody and it’s really difficult to play against them as they get a lot of pressure on you.

But we decided that we were going to try and play behind them, try to get in behind them, and I’ve got to say in the first half we did get in behind them three or four times.

We’d have liked more of them ball, but that was a little bit how we wanted to play and it worked, but it only works if you’re going to keep doing the jobs and be resilient in don’t get pushed off the ball and make the right choices in defensive situations and in the second half we didn’t do that well enough.

The only thing I would say, as I’ve said to the players, is there was a team here a couple of years ago who wouldn’t have got pushed around or shoved around.

But we’re introducing a lot of new players and they’re not quite used to how we are and we’re still integrating them.

But overall, look, there were some things tonight which hopefully will work for us in the games to come, but we’ve got to make sure that we get back to being tough and hard to play against and we were for about 50 minutes tonight.

I have to say a few decisions went against us just after half-time. Maybe around 50 minutes two or three decisions went against us which didn’t help the momentum of the game.

The manager is always responsible, but I’ve got to say, sometimes you’re looking at the players and saying ‘Come on then, are you going to stand up and accept your mistake and what are you doing about it so it won’t happen again?’.

So, we’ve got to make sure that we get back to that, being hard to play against and hard to beat, a bit more resilient away from home, because we have to start winning some games away from home.

We need to create a positive atmosphere on Friday night with our performance.

We need to do it, the players need to do it and get a result, as that gets the crowd going.

All the momentum built up over the last two years is because of the results we’ve had and that’s why the stadium was the way it is, or has been, so we have to find a way of getting the results.