David Moyes, of course, will take absolutely nothing for granted with the arrival of Doncaster Rovers as the Hammers’ fourth round FA Cup tie opponents.
The fourth-placed League One team will be no pushovers whatever the odds calculator says and Moyes is promising to offer as strong a team for the match as he considers possible.
With the odds calculator you can enter the details of your bet and it will work out what your total return would be and while backing West Ham wouldn’t result in you being much better off, you could include the Hammers in a FA Cup accumulator to lengthen your odds and see the calculator display a larger total profit for you.
Should we win a match we head for a game considered by some as the tie from hell against either Liverpool or Manchester united waits for the Hammers with Moyes claiming that should be a major incentive.
He claims that playing such teams regularly means you are involved with the top end which can only be good for the squad with spirit as it is at the club.
But it’s the tricky little Rovers encounter which is occupying his mind right now and he has some hard thinking to do on what sort of team he is going to send out at the London Stadium tomorrow afternoon where we will be overwhelming favourites to get the result.
Speaking at his presser ahead of the game he said: “I don’t think there’s any game in the FA Cup that you can turn up and say you’re going to win.
It inspires the underdog, and the media and hype that surrounds it all play a part, but we’ve been really professional and gone about our jobs in the right manner and we’ll try and do that again.
All the players in the squad have had an impact, those coming off the bench have done that and been really important for us, so I hope that some of those players can show that again.
We’ll go out to try and beat Doncaster but it’s a big day for them.
Since the draw was made, we’ve watched Doncaster three times live, or had scouts there to watch them. We try to prepare for it just as we would a Premier League game.
It is a tight turnaround since the draw, but we have made the players aware of their threats, how they play. The big thing about Doncaster is that they’re doing very well in the league, they have good momentum, they have a manager who has a level of experience in the Premier League too, so we know we’re in for a really tough day.
Any team that has momentum or is playing well in their league is always difficult opposition We saw that with Stockport too. We’ll give Doncaster the same respect as we give any Premier League team.”
Of the possibility of facing that fifth-round tie, he added: “It’s something that we want. We want to be playing against the best teams in the league and competing against them regularly because if you’re doing that it tends to mean you’re involved in quarter-finals, semi-finals – big games.
That’s what we want at West Ham, we want it to be a different mentality, so let’s hope we can do that.