West Ham United boss Slaven Bilic says his team need to toughen up in order to improve their Premier League fortunes.
Saturday’s 4-2 loss at West Bromwich Albion was the Hammers’ third in a row, and the second by that scoreline in succession, as individual errors took their toll.
The manager is confident that better form is around the corner – especially as this group showed what they were capable of with a seventh-place finish last term.
He explained: “It’s my responsibility to act, and to try to change it. For me, last year was exactly what I meant with how we wanted to play.
“Defend as a unit, like brothers, and to be solid. Tough men, tough to beat. We wanted to do that with the players who had skill and quality, and we did that for the majority of the season.
“At the moment, we are not doing that. I’m not going to hide behind being unlucky or individual mistakes.
“You have to act before the opponent, it’s not complicated to detect the problem, but it takes effort to solve it – although it’s very simple.
“The problem would be if we had a new team, but we have to start doing the things we were doing. It’s not like we have to show them Atletico Madrid and say ‘look, we have to do that’.
“We have to start doing what we were doing, not a long time ago.”