Sam Allardyce wants his West Ham United side to start turning performances into points when Queens Park Rangers visit the Boleyn Ground on Sunday.
The West Ham United manager saw encouraging showing sadly yield no return as his side were narrow losers at Manchester United on Saturday. He demanding more of his squad this Sunday and is clear that the primary area for improvement is a defence that he feels is shipping goals far too easily at present.
"Overall I wouldn't say it's been a great start [to the season] in terms of points as we should have at least nine or maybe ten points so far," Allardyce said. "There have been some great performances but great performances need to accumulate points and they're not accumulating enough points.
"Our team seriously has to start thinking about not conceding too many goals. At the moment we have to score a minimum of two goals a game and I don't think we're quite there at the moment where we can score two or more goals every game to get where we want to."
Tellingly, some generous defending from the visitors played a part in both of the host's first-half goals at Old Trafford, with two clinically-taken efforts from Wayne Rooney and Robin van Persie leaving Adrian with no chance. Big Sam's side did pull one back through Diafra Sakho's fourth goal in as many starts just before the break, before they laid siege to the Red Devils' goal in the second half following Wayne Rooney's dismissal for a kick at Stewart Downing.
"We set up to try and attack and if we hadn't have made the silly mistakes we might have won," Allardyce exaplained. "But even after they scored we had a golden chance for Enner Valencia to make it 1-1 and you've got to take your chances when you come to Old Trafford. Then, after we made a bad mistake for the second, there was a good comeback, but not good enough."
The travelling Claret and Blue Army - who were superb throughout - thought their outstanding support had been rewarded when the returning Kevin Nolan prodded in a Carl Jenkinson cross in injury time. Sadly for the West Ham United captain and the thousands of visiting fans, the goal was controversially ruled out by the assistant referee for offside, a decision Big Sam was somewhat disappointed with.
"We patiently waited to break down the ten men that were camped in their box to try and hang on for the victory. We got behind them and Kevin timed his run and put it in the net but the assistant referee has blown it for us sadly.
"But we have our own blame to take for the way we gave the first two goals away and then not taking our chances at the other end."