The last few games have been hard of course and David Moyes knows the reasons why better than anyone.

He has been trying hard to give the players some time to themselves but such has been the calendar facing the squad it becomes more and more difficult.

The Christmas and New Year is of course always hard but at the end of a year when we have also been involved in the Europa League, suffered major injuries and been involved in the Carabao Cup life isn’t easy.

Now it’s Southampton and Watford with Moysie making it crystal he wants us back to the standards of earlier in the season.

Two victories are badly required as is a Christmas and New Year programme in which further injuries are avoided.

And Moues has explained how he’d hope to give the players a bit of time and then get them focused back on their football, but when you’re churning out games all the time it makes it harder.

He said at the pre-Southampton presser: “The challenges are to try and make sure the players recover quickly and trying to decide the best way you can play people. What you don’t want is to pick up serious injuries and lose them for four or six weeks because they’ve been over played.

I look back and we’ve had this schedule here in the UK for as long as I can remember. I used to go and watch games on Boxing Day and on New Year’s Day when I was a young boy, so all these things were part of football.

I’ve got to say the amount of games we’re asking the players to play, no free weeks for them, very little time off. I do believe something probably needs to change but that’s for the experts to decide and not me. 

We had a fantastic start to the season which got us into fourth and now fifth. We have been so good that it would be difficult to absolutely maintain that all the way.

Some teams started the season poorly and have picked up a bit now, while others really started well and maybe are having a little bit of a wobble, but playing this amount of games and asking the players to keep the levels up in every game can be difficult.

We’re a team growing and trying to build – we’ve probably had 18 months where we’ve been building upwards and it wouldn’t be unusual to have a little up-and-down period.

“We need to hang in as long as we can – it’s great that I’m not talking about staying out of the bottom three, because that was the talk at West Ham for a long time, but we’ve changed it really quickly and we’re enjoying the thought of being up around the top clubs.”