West Ham United boss David Moyes has said that he has left a number of his senior players in England for the Hammers’ Europa Conference League meeting with FCSB on Thursday night.
West Ham head to Bucharest having already topped Group B with a game to spare, booking them in the Round of 16 for the competition next March.
With nothing in terms of qualification hanging in the balance, Moyes has opted to leave a number of his senior players back at Rush Green for the game. Declan Rice, Tomas Soucek, Kurt Zouma, Jarrod Bowen and Gianluca Scamacca were among those not pictured in training by the club’s media team on Thursday morning.
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However, Moyes has taken some experienced players in the travelling party to Romania as West Ham aim to be the first club ever to win six games out of a possible six in the Europa Conference League, with no team achieving it in its inaugural campaign last term.
"The biggest motivation is that we've won the group and we now need to hopefully finish it off if we can," said Moyes. "We are going to give some younger players an opportunity in the game.
"We've left the bulk of the players back home and we're looking forward to the game. There is a lot of senior players involved, they all want to be playing and we will hopefully go there and get that sixth victory.
"We're not full of young players but there's a couple of young players that are going to start tomorrow night and we will give them an opportunity and maybe some more will get an opportunity which maybe in some of the other games, we weren't able to do. We hope we can do that, but we still want to win the game.
"We still want to finish the group off well. Last year, we won the group, we had Dinamo Zagreb. We didn't quite win that in the last game, but this is another opportunity and players have done great to put themselves in this position."
For the 1-0 win over Silkeborg six days ago, Freddie Potts and Keenan Forson were on the bench. Regan Clayton, Harrison Ashby and Oliver Scarles have all also featured in matchday squads in this season's competition.
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