News

Randolph’s delight and disappointment

|

Darren Randolph stepped into the Hammers team in  the most difficult fixture of the season and didn’t let anybody down.

He has been criticised for not coming from his line for De Bruyne’s cross which led to the first goal.

That would be seen as pretty harsh by some but otherwise he made a decent return to action following the training ground elbow injury to Fab last Friday.

He had little to do during the game really before suffering a recurrence of the thigh injury which has already ruled him out of five Premier League games this season.

That was brave but the team’s ability in keeping the pressure off him for so long is yet another compliment to the way the lads performed.

Commenting to www.whufc.com at West Ham TV the No 2 stopper said: “We were right in it and created some chances and probably had the better chances out of both teams, so we were very disappointed  not to get at least a draw“

It’s a sign of how well the team has been doing and how well we’re playing that we come away from here disappointed to lose to Manchester City.

“It definitely shouldn’t dent confidence, especially the way we played. We’ve seen what Man City are capable of doing to teams this season, so we can take a lot of confidence from this and into the rest of the season.”

He was very s impressed by the way the players stuck to their task against opponents who have repeatedly swept teams aside in recent months.

“We worked hard during the week on how to contain them and winning the ball back and creating some chances for ourselves and everyone did their jobs.”

He revealed: “Lukasz got injured on Friday in a collision and I obviously had to wait to see how he was feeling on the morning of the game

. “Obviously he wasn’t feeling right, so I got told I was playing before we left the hotel, so I had another ten minutes to get ready!”

Share this article

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