Pablo Zabaleta apologised to Hammers fans following West Ham United’s 4-0 Carabao Cup third-round defeat at Oxford United.
Zabaleta told WHUFC.com “I thought it was a poor performance from everyone, we still need to learn how to play those games, especially when you come from a big win like it was against Manchester United last Sunday.
“This was a completely different game against a League One team who play a different kind of football where the intensity is higher. That’s why you have to perform well enough to win those games.
“If you look at the performance tonight, it’s not been anywhere near our standard and also in the way we lost was not good.
“We are not the first Premier League team to be knocked out of the Carabao Cup. We saw Spurs and we saw some other Premier League teams struggling to win games like that.
“Obviously we just need to move on now and look at the mistakes we have made and think about Saturday.
“We return to the Premier League again and we don’t have too much time to recover. It’s only another 48 hours and we have another game and mentally we need to be strong for Saturday.
“We feel sorry about the performance tonight and sorry to the away fans who came to the game because obviously we don’t want our fans to see this kind of performance.
“It was just a bad night.”
You are all full time professionals – and I use the term in a factual sense – and you insult us all by saying you still need to learn how to play these games! This is the day job, a job that you are all paid excessive sums to PERFORM!! Yet you say it was just a bad night!!!
SHAME ON EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU !!!!!!
Mr Pellegrini, if you can’t select, train and motivate a side to overcome the opposition, you need to take a long hard look at every aspect of this club and include yourself in that review.
Well said Ajay couldn’t have put it better myself.
To talk about other premier league teams going out is an excuse
The difference between our result and the spurs game was that spurs were all over mk dons but they couldn’t score.Us on the other hand were second best from the first minute and could have even lost by a bigger margin.
Think you will find it was Colchester Spurs played!
Ajay says it all. Quite correct. I have supported West Ham since 1958 & have seen this MANY times before. I have become quite used to these types of dismal performance over & over again. When is it going to end ? There are no excuses to be made . This was an unacceptable level of performance & effort. What can we do ? As fans, nothing. It is up to the players & manager. I completely doubt that they will pull their fingers out in future. They are quite happy to take the money & run. Shame on them. Who will be the next lower league team to completely outplay WHU, & how many will they score ?
Disgraceful the whole team should be ashamed of their selves.
Our loyal travelling fans should all get refunded by the team for that performance.
There was radio coverage: I listened to the entire debacle on BBC London. Beyond Noble and Rice, there’s no central midfield at West Ham. Wilshere and Sanchez are simply not up to scratch.