David Moyes has every right to be prouder than Punch and he most certainly is after tonight’s win over Bundesliga outfit Freiburg in the Europa Cup victory tonight.
He has now led the club to 17 unbeaten Euro matches and passed the likes of legendary Spurs boss Bill Nicolson and Leeds manager Don Revie way back in the 60s and 7Os.
It is one heck of an achievement and even his fiercest critics are disappearing very fast indeed – these are extraordinary days for this club of ours.
The victory which put is ahead of the two teams from 1968 and 1972 was hard won and the most important thing of all but it remains a wonderful achievement.
Moyes’ smile said it all afterwards and it came following a real battling vioctory against the German team.
He was quick to congratulate his team – which is the strongest he has put out last year and this in the early stages of the Conference and Europa competitions.
He told www.whufc.com: ” Seventeen matches unbeaten in Europe fills me with so much pride.
I got told about the record yesterday and I was quite thrilled to even be level with the two managers who were in question, Don Revie and Bill Nicholson, and I have to say I was delighted with getting the win.
The record is always really good to get, but more important was winning tonight, and getting those three points is so good, particularly when many would consider this the hardest game in the group.
I thought we pressed well. Jarrod Bowen and Lucas Paquetá did a great job for us up there and I think it as a brilliant early goal.
It was a bit of an old-fashioned one in that he’s gone on the outside, crossed it in the box and it was a great, centre-forward’s leap from Paquetá. I loved the first goal. I thought it was really good and I really enjoyed it.
Lucas was terrific tonight. You can be pulling your hair out at times, with some of the things he does, but we can all stand back and admire someone who has got terrific strength, great ball control, skills, and wants to make risky passes and try things. He’s an incredibly talented footballer and tonight he showed that.
James Ward-Prowse has been great for us as have Edson and all the boys who have come in. We’re doing well in the cups and we’re in a decent position in the league at the moment. We want to keep it going. We don’t want to shout too much about it, but James’ deliveries are fabulous.
We wanted to be strong in this game. I see Freiburg and Olympiacos both as competitive and very difficult to beat in this group, and it’s probably the most difficult group we’ve had in a European campaign so far.
I just feel the boys are doing a brilliant job. We’ve come away from home, got a result, our run in Europe continues and we’ve done really well. Hopefully it keeps building.
We’re on a good run of form and we want to take it into this weekend’s game.
We’ll dust ourselves down tonight. It’s never easy, going from Thursday night to Sunday, so we need to go back at it for what will be a huge game, especially after the way Newcastle played against PSG.”