Moyes: “That was rubbish…”

David Moyes was unready to pull any punches after a performance which left an awful lot to be desired and admitted he couldn’t understand much of what had happened out there.

Teams have periods when they struggle – that’s a given – but the opening of the match today took us back to the Slaven Bilic days before he was sacked  when the squad had trouble getting out of the traps and found themselves behind as a result.

We have shown ourselves good at chasing games under Moyes but it was Southampton who delivered that sort of sucker punch on us today and the manager wasn’t happy.

The draw at Burnley could just about be stomached because we at least imposed ourselves for longish period despite being unable to score.

However, to get two on our own manor and be turned over for the first time by Saints since goodness knows when really isn’t good enough and that, as much as anything else, no doubt led to the Moyes post-match outburst.

He said: “It was rubbish, rubbish from the start – not from start to finish because we were better in the second half, but we were flat in the opening part of the game, for what reason I have no idea but we were.

We didn’t really get anything out of it, the amount of poor decisions and passes we made, we didn’t press well, so lots of things didn’t go as well as we’d have liked.

I thought that once we got back level there would really only be one winner if we kept doing the right things.

I thought for five minutes after our goals we did keep doing the right things, but then we gave away a horrendous second goal.

Then we got back in it again and I was thinking there were still over 20 minutes and we’d have enough time to get a winner, then we go and give them another goal from a free-kick, so it was not a good day for us.

We’ve got to watch that we don’t just focus on Mick getting a goal – it’s the whole team winning which is most important rather than any individual scoring a goal.

I don’t really care who scores the goals as long as the team wins and we didn’t win today.

Courtesy www.whufc.com

[For their penalty], I think the first contact [from Craig Dawson on Armando Broja] was outside the box, and by the second contact their player was already falling over.

We’ve seen quite a few VAR decisions and the referee was sent to look at the screen and he chose to give the penalty.

I think the angle the referee gets to see is unfair and he doesn’t get to see all the action, so I think that’s not a particularly good thing by VAR, but that’s what they wanted to show.”

He shrugged off the Declan Rice yellow card and his absence from the match against Watord on Tuesday saying: “We missed Dec for five games at the end of season but we still picked up points and this is only one game, so we’ll try to do that again.

I think everybody in the stadium was a bit flat today. There were less people for obvious reasons because of the COVID.

I think that had a little bit of an effect on the players coming out to a lot of empty seats today, but hopefully we get everybody back when this COVID is all over.