David Moyes felt his team were punished for defensive mistakes and failing to take their own chances at big moments in Sunday’s 2-0 Premier League defeat at Tottenham Hotspur.
The Irons started well in north London, pressing high and forcing their opponents into mistakes in their own half. Jarrod Bowen nearly benefitted within a minute, but fired wide, while Tomáš Souček and Michail Antonio kept the Spurs defence occupied and Declan Rice and Flynn Downes controlled the midfield.
But the opening goal did not arrive and that control gradually ebbed away. A slow start to the second half saw a Pierre-Emile Höjbjerg pass pierce the West Ham defence and allow Ben Davies to run through and square for Emerson Royal to score.
Bowen fashioned an opportunity to equalise moments later, but his well-struck shot was saved by Fraser Forster. And with just under 20 minutes to play, the game was over as Harry Kane threaded in Heung-min Son to fire home.
The Claret and Blue Army stuck with their team to the bitter end at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, despite being mocked by their opposite numbers in the home seats, but they ultimately had precious little to cheer as their team saw their winless away run in the Premier League stretched to ten matches.
I tell you what, I thought we did a lot of really good things, but the result matters and in the position we’re in the only thing that really cares is that you get three points.
The most important things in football are to score goals and make sure you don’t concede and when we needed real focus and concentration not to concede we didn’t show, and when we had the slight moments to score goals, it wasn’t enough for us to take the half-opportunities.
I thought we started great.
We had warned the players that we had been so bad in the opening part [of games] and we needed start better and we did.
To be fair, we played well for most of the first half. Maybe for five or ten minutes we weren’t as good as we’d like to have been, but overall we did a pretty good job.
We told them [at half-time] that we needed to start well, but we played the ball backwards when we shouldn’t have done, when we should have been looking to play through the lines to our forward players, but for some reason we made choices to go back to the goalkeeper and we were giving it away from that point and we got caught on the ball a couple of times and I think that gave Tottenham encouragement.
I think we’ve probably conceded other goals that were just as bad, but today I do think that I was really unhappy with the first one.
I don’t think you should be able to pass the ball through the centre of our defence and have somebody run off the line and into the space. I think that’s ridiculous if that happens.
And the second one, we should have won a bit of a fight, which we had to do, so I was disappointed with that.
The areas of the field where we’ve been strong recently have been because we’ve been trying to keep a better defensive record because we’re not scoring bundles of goals which is an issue for us.
We went to Newcastle, we went a goal down and got one back from a set piece, then against Chelsea we went a goal behind and got a wee bit of luck with a flick-on and got it at the back post, but today we didn’t get that bit we needed.
We went 1-0 down and Jarrod went through had a shot at goal so I’ve got to say the boys showed a lot of fight and good spirit and they’re up for whatever comes next.
I don’t think we’ve ever made excuses.
Look, we’re all, with me at the front of it, have got to put our chests out and get on with it.
I think the supporters probably believed we played well and we did for long periods in the game, but a couple of lapses in concentration, especially the first one, put us behind and thinking ‘here we go’.
Because we’ve not been scoring loads of goals, it made it a mountain to climb when we went 1-0 down.
