Manuel Pellegrini’s unbeaten Premier League record against Newcastle goes on the line at the London Stadium today.
The Hammers boss saw the team beaten in a pre-season friendly in China of course and has suffered a League Cup reverse against the Geordies during his time at Manchester City but beyond that they are probably one of his favourite oppositions.
He has proved invincible against them in the Premier League racking up five wins and a draw between the 2013/14 and 2015/16 seasons scoring 20 goals along the way.
However, he is a cautious soul and is not relying on past records to produce victory today, knowing that the Hammers will need a much improved performance than in previous games.
Commenting to reporters he declared: “I don’t think that statistics are that important when you want to win a game.
We need to play a good game, improve on what we did in the last two games at home. I don’ think we played bad against Crystal Palace, we had chances to win the game.
Also against Sheffield, but we didn’t take them. We need to pay more attention to keep the clean sheet and then decide the game because both times, we had chances to do that.”
He added: “I just said that there are different ways to play, you can maybe score one goal and then defend the rest of the way and try to score a second goal on the counter attack.
I think that in both games, we had the options playing the same way to score more goals but we didn’t. We must improve on both sides.”
The home record of course is a big concern to him – as reported elsewhere on the site- and he dropped a reminder that we may be suffering the same sort of problem to last season.
He said: “If you remember last season we lost a lot of games at home and it was the opposite in the second half of the season. Things happen during the game but the only way to get better is to improve concentrate and be a complete team.
You can talk about defending and attacking, I involve all the players. In attacking we must be more accurate with our finishing.