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Slav’s verdict!

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BilicberrySlaven Bilic made it clear that mistakes cost us dearly against City and maybe pointed fingers for the first time this season.

Speaking after the match the manager said: “We gave the ball away for their first and third goals and we made mistakes.

“It’s hard to go so quickly 2-0 down and then we make another mistake and then after that we weren’t aggressive enough and we didn’t close them down.

“We can say that it’s playing Man City and not every team is like Man City and that’s true but we have to get over this game and we have to prepare for the game against Southampton.

“They beat us 5-0 in the cup and then 4-0 tonight and make no mistake, we have to give them credit but it was also about us.

“We gave those kind of players too much space and time on the ball and space between the lines. When you give them space like that they just slaughter you.

“It was very frustrating and it’s like what happened in the cup. We again started well but when you make mistakes like we did for some of their goals and if you give the ball away in those areas then they punish you. After that, it’s very difficult to play against them.”

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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

8 comments

  • Hinckley Hammer says:

    How can Leicester make Man City look so awful and beat them comfortably when we can’t? Answer is that Leicester pressed them hard in defensive areas and used the pace and non stop running of Vardy largely to achieve this. We need Sakho back asap to provide this level of pressing against teams to be able to compete IMO.

  • Michael Miller says:

    You give Manchester City room to play and they’ll murder you, that’s what happened last night. The only way to play Man City is to get in their faces and hustle them into mistakes. West Ham didn’t do that and pad the price!

    One incident which surprised me was when Cresswell, under no pressure just played the ball into space and Man City siezed on it, he then got into a wrestling match with Sterling as they both ran towards West Hams goal and ended up lying face down on the turf – what the hell was he doing?

    Having said that, Silva and De Bruyne looked fantastic, De Jesus, Sane and Sterling were very good and their defence and goalkeeper had virtually nothing to do.

  • West Ham Fan No 32 says:

    What the hell did you do in training, you could have virtually picked their team yourself, you know it going to be DeBruyne, Silva, Sterling and either Aguerro or Jesus up front, you also know Toure is about as good at defending as his fat diet pill popping brother and the rest of their defenders are cr@p and they are going to pass the ball to a goalkeeper who won’t have a clue what to do with it, so why when they were passing it around at the back were we left with our slowest player Carroll pressing the ball, it should have been at least 3 people pressing maybe 4 or 5 then we might have won the ball in an area where their midfielders are less of a threat and we have a chance to score. In that starting team tonight we had Antonio, Feghouli and Obiang who have a little bit of pace, they had Sane, Sterling, Jesus, Silva, DeBruyne, Sagna all that can and do break with speed, our counter attack wouldn’t worry a team of OAP’s let alone a top PL side and as much as our lack of intensity has been a problem the lack of pace has been an equal problem, we scored a lot of rebound goals last season by fast counter attacking football, with the likes of Valencia, Sakho, Antonio, Kouyate, Moses etc breaking aided by Payet and Lanzini after we had pressed the opponents into making mistakes, this season its like the ferrari has been replaced by a milk float and even that has a flat battery.

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