David Moyes felt David de Gea was the only reason his West Ham United team left Manchester United empty-handed on Sunday afternoon.
The Hammers fell behind to Marcus Rashford’s header seven minutes before half-time at Old Trafford, before unleashing a second-half barrage on the home goal.
Time and again, Moyes’ men got into dangerous areas and, in the final quarter of the game, it was only De Gea’s heroics that kept the Irons from levelling and potentially going on to win the game.
The Spaniard, who played under Moyes for the Red Devils in 2013/14, made fingertip saves to deny Michail Antonio, Kurt Zouma and Declan Rice, while Jarrod Bowen was only denied by a miraculous block by Harry Maguire.
Zouma may also have had a penalty when he was caught after shooting by Scott McTominay, but as it was at Chelsea and Liverpool, the ball just would not go in for Moyes’ men, leaving the manager proud of his team, but at the same time scratching his head.
I thought it was a game today when – and I don’t like saying it because when you lose, you lose, and we’ve had too many hard luck stories I’ve talked about this year – we pushed a big team really close.
We did it at Anfield a couple of weeks ago and we did it again today and we just couldn’t get ourselves the goal.
As I’ve been saying the last few weeks, we’re just lacking that last little bit of quality at the moment.
David de Gea was brilliant for them today.
He made two great saves, but we won 2-0 against Bournemouth and 1-0 in midweek [against Silkeborg in the UEFA Europa Conference League], and we need to be getting more goals than that.
Today we lost 1-0, so great credit to the defence for the way they’ve played against a good team, but we need to start taking more opportunities and creating more opportunities.
For us, I know Lukasz Fabianski had a sore knee and we weren’t going to take the chance at half-time. He just told me his knee went back and he had a little bit of a jar on his knee.
I thought there were periods of the first half, especially the first 15 minutes, which were fine, then we had a period when we started giving the ball away and started making terrible mistakes on the ball and gave them two or three opportunities from it.
The goal came from a really poor throw-in that we didn’t defend well enough, but what you couldn’t [criticise] was the quality of their cross and their finish.
That’s what we need to do. Other teams will make mistakes and then what you need is the quality of the cross or the quality of the finish to maybe win you the game. We’ve just been missing that, but ultimately we didn’t defend it as well as we should have done.
It’s not worth talking about decisions because we are talking about them every week, aren’t we.
It’s one of those days. It’s always very difficult when you come to these grounds to get decisions; you have to earn it.
I have to stop talking about us, but I think we’ve been a bit unlucky in the away games especially.
Our performances have merited more and we need to find a way of turning our good work into more goals.
Our set pieces today were a threat, but we just couldn’t get a clear header on one, really, so we’re disappointed we didn’t take something because we deserved at least a point from the game.
