David Moyes has hardly put a foot wrong since he returned for a second managerial stint at West Ham in December 2019 but the early signs are that this may be a season of consolidation for him and his team.
A manager of his vast experience will rightly look at the bigger picture, despite three successive defeats in the Premier League. However, West Ham’s vibrant Europa League adventure last season is already a distant memory and even back then, there were ominous signs that the dynamism which took Moyes’s team to European qualification was beginning to tail off.
They won only one of the last seven Premier League games and — apart from a 4-0 win over already doomed Norwich — the goals were already drying up.
Since then the “small things”, as Moyes described them after yesterday’s 2-0 defeat by Brighton, have worked against him.
Their early summer signing, Nayef Aguerd, badly injured an ankle in a pre-season friendly at Rangers and the ever reliable centre-half Craig Dawson sustained a thigh injury from which he still has not recovered.
The fixture list also did them no favours, with a first game against the champions, Manchester City, followed by a trip to newly-promoted Nottingham Forest and then Brighton, who West Ham have not managed to beat in 11 attempts now.
The biggest negative, though, and something which Moyes referenced after yesterday’s game, has been the retirement of the talismanic Mark Noble.
Noble, who would bleed claret and blue, was a big personality in the dressing room and invaluably combative out on the pitch when things needed shaking up.
“Losing Mark Noble was important,” said Moyes. “He could see things even though he didn’t play much last season. He was important around the club.
“Small things can make a big difference sometimes. You look at the game against Brighton and you’re saying, ‘You take responsibility, you take ownership of it.’ I could name a few and say, ‘Come on, you bowed to that today when you should have taken it on’, but on the whole, the players have done great.
“You would probably say it was a really poor performance against Brighton and many wouldn’t disagree but there were parts that weren’t as bad as maybe it looked. I hope I’m right but I will only see proof of that in the coming weeks.”
Moyes said he slept on who to play in what has been a problem position at the centre of defence before picking his latest signing, Thilo Kehrer, who conceded the 22nd-minute penalty that Alexis Mac Allister duly converted. Leandro Trossard scored Brighton’s second in the 66th minute.
Moyes has only to look back to his 11 years at Everton to know that, for the clubs with finite funds, there are invariably bumps in the road. In his second full season at Goodison, for example, Everton finished 17th before going on to bigger and better things.
“I have been saying for a bit that we’re not quite ready yet, we haven’t got everything in place and there’s a little bit of a change coming,” he said.
With what he has already achieved at West Ham, there is no argument that Moyes deserves the time he needs
With what he has already achieved at West Ham, there is no argument that Moyes deserves the time he needs to complete that change.
He is hopeful of signing Chelsea full-back Emerson Palmieri this week. A fee of £13 million has been agreed.
Belgium midfielder Hans Vanaken, meanwhile, has repeated his desire to join West Ham.
The Club Brugge captain said after yesterday’s match against Kortrijk: “This may be my last chance to play abroad and I want to take it. Discussions with the club will begin on Monday.”
