Graham Potter’s pain and disappointment was written all over his face after West Ham United’s 5-1 Premier League defeat by Chelsea at London Stadium.
The Head Coach was visibly hurt by the performance his team put on in their first home game of the 2025/26 campaign, and spoke of his frustration at seeing the Hammers concede multiple goals through not doing the basics well enough for the second game in succession.
As was the case at Sunderland the previous weekend, West Ham were beaten too easily by opponents who competed and simply played better than the east Londoners did.
The result was a second humbling defeat in the space of seven days and a Head Coach looking deep and working hard for solutions to put things right and turn losing frowns into winning smiles as soon as possible.
It had all started so well on Friday evening as Lucas Paquetá thumped the Irons into a sixth-minute lead, but goals from João Pedro, Pedro Neto and Enzo Fernández exposed West Ham’s weaknesses and had Chelsea 3-1 up by half-time – albeit Niclas Füllkrug’s disallowed goal for offside against Jean-Clair Toidbo at 1-1 was an undoubted turning point.
Moisés Caicedo and Trevoh Chalobah made it five for the Blues 55 minutes before they took their collective foot off the pedal, but by then the damage had been done.
It's bitterly disappointing, of course, with the results, with the manner of the goals. I thought they were too cheap.
I think when you do that, it gives yourself a real challenge in the Premier League, and especially when it's a team with the talent and the quality that Chelsea have. It was a tough evening for us.
I think it probably set the tone, their first goal. Again, too easy, too cheap. And then we're probably fine margins.
We're unlucky not to go 2-1 up. We scored a good goal, a good reaction from the players. But then again, their second goal is a poor goal from our perspective.
We have to do a lot better than that. I think the players will be honest enough to say that. We have to do better.
And then once you're behind in the game, you're caught between going after them and putting some pressure on, and at the same time getting played through because of the quality they have. But nevertheless, I thought we can say what we want. When you concede the goals that we did, it makes the game nigh on impossible.
It can happen in football. Of course it can. Goals happen and we're in a moment where the week we've had has been a really difficult week. There's no getting away from that.
So psychologically, we've got some challenges. We have to work. We've got a game on Tuesday [at Wolverhampton Wanderers in the Carabao Cup], which I think is good for us.
We need to prepare and move forward to that. We have to stick together. There's no point in me pointing fingers and all that stuff.
Collectively, we weren't good enough today. We have to take that responsibility together. And we have to move forward and work harder.
We have to dust ourselves down.
No-one's going to feel sorry for us and they shouldn't do. We know today wasn't good enough. We know today we need to do better.
And we have to make sure that we're ready to play Wolves. It's as simple as that. But no, we're disappointed today, of course.
We're bitterly disappointed because the fans were there. They were there with us and we've let them down in terms of the goals we've conceded and in the end, the result we've given.
I'm upset. This is my life. This is my career. I've got a family and kids. I'm a normal person, just like you.
I know the supporters, obviously, they're gutted after a game like this, but I assure you, we're all feeling the same. But that's sport. That's sport at the highest level.
We can't feel sorry for ourselves. We have to dust ourselves down. We have to go again. It's as simple as that.
It's difficult to speak about positives at the moment. We're hurting and we're in pain because we've lost the game.
We've lost the game heavily at home in front of our supporters. We're licking our wounds and we're trying to piece it all together and getting ready to move forward.
It's going to be a busy few days.
We need to work hard and we need to try our best to improve.
We need to improve the players we have and try to look for players that can help us as well from the outside.
