Moyes reveals his next West Ham steps

David Moyes has been explaining the next stage of his hopes for Hammers redevelopment and consolidation appears to be the name of the game.

That the man has made extraordinary progress cannot be denied – our match tomorrow night following a group topping excursion into the Euro Cup and League position this season is extraordinary in our terms.

But to use the cliche, Rome wasn’t built in a day and it appears that a slowly slowly approach is on hand and the main objective is to maintain our position.

In his Standard Sport he told the ‘paper: “I see the next step as consolidation of where we are. If people say you should be finishing fourth or fifth, that could be ahead of where we are.

We’re still building, we’ve got there quickly but we have to try to stay in that position. Our objective is to get to European football again.”

Tomorrow night’s game brings the response: “We’ve probably got the toughest game in the round but in a way that’s what we wanted. We wanted to challenge Man City, Liverpool, Chelsea and we want to challenge Sevilla, Barcelona, whoever it is.

Whatever happens between now and the end of the season, a pivotal summer lies ahead if the club is to remain on an upward trajectory — and Moyes has hinted at difficult decisions.

He will see Mark Noble marking a club juncture with his retirement , while the uncomfortable question of Declan Rice’s future is regularly under discussion.

He explained: “My own worry now is how to keep going for the next few years, how I build on it, how I keep growing it

“On and off the pitch, things will be broken which we’ll have to try and fix. Certainly, Mark Noble leaving will be one of them. We’ve got a fight on and I need to find a way of getting us stronger for next year.

“I see new players, I see a stronger squad, I see a change of the guard in some places because of what’s happening at the club. But that will be normal. We do have to make changes in the summer, we do need to look at how to move forward again.

“I don’t want to go stale, and when I see things dropping away, I have to make sure I step up. We can’t do too much about it at the moment, but we have to make sure we keep squeezing the last bit out of them that we can.

“In football management, you have to make some unpopular decisions at times, that’s part of the job. But, look, I’ll always try to make the right decisions for West Ham.”

“We know we’ve got a relatively small squad — it was the way we chose to be at the start. The job for me is to get good targets and add to the squad. But it’s not always spending big money that brings you success.”

Moyes is confident West Ham are here to stay as a major player in English and European football and, for all the talk of the next step, he has not forgotten where they came from.

“I don’t think we’re going anywhere,” the Scot said. “We’re there. We’re going into March still in the hunt for European football and we’re still in a European competition. We’ve got to see that as a real positive. I do.

“At this time in years gone by it was panic stations — ‘can we stay out of the relegation zone?’ We might have three games to go and we’d be looking at the other teams fixtures thinking, ‘can we stay up?’

“I see it now being a completely different mindset and looking at the top teams and hoping they’re losing because we’re trying to challenge them. That has been a big, big change.”

 

About Hugh5outhon1895

Hugh Southon is a lifelong Iron and the founding editor of ClaretandHugh. He is a national newspaper journalist of many years experience and was Bobby Moore's 'ghost' writer during the great man's lifetime. He describes ClaretandHugh as "the Hammers daily newspaper!" Follow on Twitter @hughsouthon