David Moyes: It was a good, tough test at Brentford

 

 

West Ham United boss David Moyes was pleased to see his team come through a tough pre-season test at Premier League new boys Brentford on Saturday with another positive result under their belt.

Saïd Benrahma's sublime second half goal was enough to secure a 1-0 victory in west London - the fourth win in a row that Moyes' men have put together this pre-season.

While the manager reiterated that results are not the main focus at this stage, he is pleased that the team, still short of many of their players involved at the Euro 2020 finals, are building momentum.
 

We knew it was a tough test today, so I was pleased with how we dealt with it...

I think we were quite good in the first half. We did some good stuff and I'm pleased because we're not at full tilt but we're getting there.

We saw this as being a really tough game - probably tougher, even, than the game last week at Celtic - and it proved to be, and I'm pleased we got a result.

We don't get carried away by the results, of course. I want to build a better team, I want to help build a better club all round, and the way to do that is by winning. That gives us a chance and hopefully we can keep it going.

 

Said Benrahma scores at Brentford

 

I'm delighted for Saïd scoring back here and we're hoping that's a sign of things to come...

It was a good goal. He's been waiting on that one for a year, hasn't he? He practices it a lot and today he hit the target. Maybe it's fitting that he did it here.

He also scored at Celtic last week and it's good to build his confidence in that way. We've got a lot of hope that he will get in and find his goalscoring touch, and assists and all those bits to do with his game. We want good competition and hopefully we'll have lots of people threatening to score goals this season.

 

We gave a lot of players 90 minutes today and that was another plus point...

I wanted to give players closer to 90 minutes today - and I didn't really have an awful lot of options as a lot of the subs played last night for the under-23s. 

So for them to have the feeling that they've had the minutes as the season gets closer is good. Overall I'm glad to get them back in and give the players those minutes. The clean sheet was good, but again it'll be the season where it really matters. That's when we'll really want the clean sheets.

Overall there's been lots of things to be really pleased with this pre-season. I thought Conor Coventry played well today, we played Ben Johnson out of position, higher up as a wide-right today because we didn't have Jarrod, we didn't have Angelo.

We're having to look and see at what we might have to do at different times in the season and it gives me a chance to try one or two things out.