Few players have benefitted more from David Moyes’ decision to go five at the back than Aaron Creswell.
Making no bones about it, he has looked an entirely different player to the point where the likes of Gary Lineker have claimed he must be knocking on the England door.
With Arthur Masuaku in front of him Cress has been outstanding over the last seven games in a defence which has now enjoyed back to back clean sheets.
Going forward he has looked a real threat and has defied those of us who perhaps believed his best days were behind him.
And in a new interview which can be found in the programme for the game against Villa on Monday he has spoken of the change of fortune in hios own and the hammers gam this season.
Commenting at https://www.whufc.com/news/articles/2020/november/26-november/aaron-cresswell-there-no-substitute-hard-work-and-team he explained his feeling as we go for our third win on the trot.
He said: “At the minute it’s obviously going well, both for me and for the whole team.
“Personally, I feel like I’m playing as consistently as I have at any time since I joined West Ham, certainly since my first season.
“For us to have 14 points after nine games, considering the teams we’ve played against, it’s a great return and we’ve been in excellent form. Long may it continue.
“The system we’ve been using in recent weeks with three centre-halves has given us a base to build from, but it’s a system that the manager has tweaked in each of our matches.
“It’s more complicated than just saying we play with five at the back, because players fill slightly different positions and have different roles depending on the opposition and the state of the particular game.
“Overall, though, it’s given us a set-up that is defensively solid and enables us to keep the ball and hurt certain teams and also to counter-attack against opponents who have the majority of possession.
“As you saw, we can be effective either way, scoring lots of goals as we did against Wolves, Leicester and Tottenham, and also keeping clean sheets, as we’ve done four times in our opening nine games.”
Cresswell ranks first in assists, second in passes, third in clearances, fourth in tackles among West Ham players, while only six other players have created more chances in the Premier League than the 30-year-old – impressive statistics for a centre-back!
The defender added: “Our defensive record and the clean sheets we’ve kept are down to a lot of things, but mainly the work we do on the training ground and the fantastic spirit we have in the squad.
“We’ve got a togetherness that we haven’t had at times over the last few seasons, so hopefully that can continue because we’ve got a great set of lads fighting for one another at the minute.”
