Graham Potter expressed his disappointment following West Ham United’s 3-0 defeat at Sunderland in their opening clash of the 2025/26 Premier League season.
The Hammers initially responded well to the thumping atmosphere inside the Stadium of Light, dominating the ball for large parts of the first half while creating decent openings for the likes of El Hadji Malick Diouf and Jarrod Bowen.
But the Black Cats profited from a below-par West Ham showing after the break, with Eliezer Mayenda breaking the deadlock just after the hour mark with a headed strike after he beat Nayef Aguerd in the air.
A second header - this time from Northern Ireland international Dan Ballard - little over ten minutes later, and a late Wilson Isidor goal put the result beyond doubt, and capped a tough afternoon for Potter and his troops.
Following an encouraging pre-season campaign, during which the Irons went unbeaten and in fact won four of their five games, the Head Coach acknowledged there were very few positives to take from their first competitive outing of the fresh campaign.
He pointed to the fact that his players didn’t do the basics right against a side roared on by a crowd full of energy, but promised to oversee a week of hard work back at Rush Green before next Friday’s clash against Chelsea at London Stadium.
The result is obviously bad for us, and the second half was really disappointing.
In the first half, I thought we were good. I thought we did lots well in terms of quieting the crowd down and creating some opportunities. We could have scored, I thought, but nevertheless, we felt OK.
We started a bit slow in the second half, and from out of nowhere, a goal goes in and it becomes difficult. It was a game where probably the first goal, especially here with the environment, was going to be challenging for us. But we tried to push.
But in trying to push, we opened ourselves up. The second goal’s a poor one - a mistake leads to a cheap set-piece, and then we didn’t do the basics well enough in the second phase.
We haven’t done the basics well enough - it’s as simple as that, and we have to improve that.
Their first goal didn’t come from any fantastic play from their perspective, and I don’t say that with any disrespect.
It was just a ball in the box that we have to do better with. Whether we thought subconsciously it was a comfortable one, I’m not sure, but that’s not good for us at all.
In these environments, you’re never comfortable. You’re never safe, and we didn’t do enough at the start of the second half.
Even though it was stop-start, we didn’t do enough, and there wasn’t too much to like about that second half from our perspective.
I think that sometimes the game doesn’t always restart after half-time with the same tempo or flow.
There might be a few substitutions or injuries, but at the same time, like I said, the goals haven’t come from much.
Then, once you’re 1-0 down, it becomes challenging. We responded well in pre-season to those sorts of situations, so we have to learn from today. If you don’t do the basics right, at any level, you’re in trouble, and I don’t think we did enough today.
Of course, we have to respond now.
We have to do the basics better, for sure. We have to learn this painful lesson, because if you don’t, you can talk about how well you play, or about attacking football or whatever, but ultimately it doesn’t matter.
If you don’t do the basics well, then it’s hard to win games. So, we have to really improve that, get back to Rush Green and start working again.
