- Captain Winston Reid disappointed and frustrated by Friday's Emirates FA Cup defeat by Manchester City
- Hammers beaten by a joint-record five-goal margin, losing 5-0 at London Stadium
- Defender says West Ham United need to regroup ahead of Premier League fixture with Crystal Palace
Winston Reid says West Ham United need to dig deep following Friday’s 5-0 Emirates FA Cup third-round defeat by Manchester City.
The Hammers suffered the joint-heaviest FA Cup defeat in the Club’s long history at London Stadium, and the captain admitted the team had simply not played well enough to secure a positive result.
After a bright start, a debateable Yaya Toure penalty put the hosts on the back foot. They came back strongly, only for Sofiane Feghouli to miss an open goal and a Havard Nordtveit own-goal and David Silva strike to put the game beyond Slaven Bilic’s side at half-time.
It got worse after the break, with Sergio Aguero and John Stones rubbing salt in the Hammers’ wounds, leaving Reid feeling decidedly frustrated.
“To be fair, we started OK and had some chances, but we’ve just been made silly errors again and if you do that against a team like Manchester City, you get punished,” he told whufc.com. “There was just not enough there at the end of the day, which is really disappointing.
“As a group of players, we should be able to do better. At least we can demand that. It was eleven against eleven and we were at home and you can get beaten on the day, especially against a good team like them, but it was not our night.”
The defender, who tried manfully to stem the City tide on a night to forget, said Bilic’s squad need to get back on the training pitch and work this performance and result out of their systems.
With Sam Allardyce’s Crystal Palace next up at London Stadium on Saturday 14 February, Reid says the Hammers have to give absolutely everything to improve their position in the Premier League table.
After losing 5-1 at home to Arsenal on 3 December, West Ham took ten points from four matches to climb the table, and the New Zealand defender wants the team to produce a similar response to Friday’s heavy defeat.
There was just not enough there at the end of the day, which is really disappointing
Winston Reid
“We’ve got eight days until the next game and we’ve been picking up points in the league,” he continued. “We won three games on the trot and then were a bit unlucky against Leicester and then had that decision against Man United. Those last two games were tough.
“When you’ve momentum, you’ve got to keep it going. We had a full house and were playing against a big team, but when you make mistakes, at the end of the day you get punished, especially against these.
“That’s the underlying fact – we made too many individual mistakes which cost us football matches. We weren’t making them recently like we were at the start of the season, and that makes it difficult for a team to recover.
“One-hundred per cent we need to bounce back like we did after the Arsenal game. We can be honest and say the season hasn’t panned out like we wanted it to so far, but we still have half-a-season to go and our focus is on getting up the league – we need to do that.”