David Moyes spoke to the media at length following West Ham United’s 1-1 draw against Newcastle United at St James’ Park.
The Hammers got off to a terrible start when Callum Wilson opened the scoring for Newcastle after three minutes, shortly after Joe Willock’s goal in the opening seconds was ruled out by VAR.
But West Ham hit back and deserved to go in at half-time on level terms after Lucas Paqueta's 32 nd equaliser. Here is every word Moyes had to say on the game, Declan Rice, Lucas Paqueta, Nayef Aguerd and more.
READ MORE: 'Blown out of the water' - David Moyes makes transfer record claim on West Ham's Declan Rice
Your team responded well to get a point?
[We] Responded great. I felt we played incredibly well today. After going a goal behind it would have been easy to buckle and go under with the way the crowd is here and the way they [Newcastle] are playing.
But I have to say, you have to give the players huge credit and huge praise for how well they went about it. I thought they played really well in the first-half with maybe the exception of the first minute where we got our fingers burned at the start. After that, I thought we played really well and were worthy to be drawing at half-time.
How happy are you with the momentum you’re on at the moment?
We’ve won at Derby and Brentford away, we drew at Leeds and we’ve drawn at Newcastle in the away games recently, so that’s a start on the away games. I think we’ve only had two home games since December 26, so it’s difficult to comment and we’ve won one of them. From that point of view we’ve got to try and build it on it, but look it’s a long way to go and we’ve only just started. when you consider where we’ve been, we’re not enjoying the position we’re in. But I thought today the team played against a team in really good form and matched them. We’ve done well against them.
Lucas Paqueta’s second goal for the club, do you think he is slowly starting to become more adapted to the Premier League?
Yeah. I thought, I mean I don’t think I should even mention the word on Declan Rice on how well he played, or Lucas Paqueta. I thought they were both immense, especially in the first minute, maybe not the first minute. They were top boys. I’m glad for Lucas because we brought him to bring us some goals and the other things is we haven’t scored many goals from set pieces this season, I think that’s probably one of our first goals from a set-piece.
Angelo Ogbonna has been playing well recently, how happy are you that he is starting to show signs of the old Ogbonna from last season?
Yeah, I think we’ve started to. Angelo done his cruciate at the age of 34 and it’s not an easy thing to come back from. He deserves a lot of credit for getting himself back and getting in shape. [Nayef] Aguerd has helped a lot as well, had an incredible tackle in the second-half maybe to bail us out of a difficult situation. A lot of positives to take from the game. We’d have liked to have taken more but I think, where we are at the moment coming here to Newcastle and where they are, a point is a decent result.
What did you make of Declan Rice’s performance and the leadership he showed on the pitch after that bad start?
I don’t know if I need to say the words, I think you’d maybe say the words if you watched it the way I saw it. I thought he was a top player in the first-half, really was. Showed so many things and you know it’s interesting, undoubtedly, Declan is going to be a top player and undoubtedly he’ll be a British transfer record if he ever leaves West Ham, and more.
I won’t ask you how much that’s going to be?
You shouldn’t. Not when you’re looking at what you buy for 85 or 90 [million pounds] nowadays.
When you make a start like that, do you fear the worst?
Yeah I did actually. But I knew the group had been improving and I felt that there was good things about them. They were ready for the game today. We got a couple of days longer break than Newcastle did. Why I bring that up is because we’ve had it Thursday, Sunday, when we’ve not been getting the break and we’ve had to live with that and how the football is and it’s only when you start to get the regular games do you realise what it does to your players playing so quickly again. So we got a little bit of an advantage having a couple of days longer than Newcastle.
You said Declan [Rice] would be a British transfer record whenever he leaves West Ham, is that an inevitably?
I hope it’s not. I hope he sees his time here. Look, there’s a lot of talk about it and it’s just important when you see what’s going about for the prices. I think Declan will be blowing that out of the water, that’s for sure, when it comes around.
Nayef Aguerd’s challenge on Callum Wilson, what does that say about the team’s desire and his talent?
I’ve got to say I compare him a lot to [Sven] Botman. Botman and Aguerd I thought were probably the two best left footed centre-backs in France. Obviously there’s the boy who has gone to Chelsea and there’s a few others but they were in a similar category. And we lost our centre-half for six months at the start of the season when he got an injury at Ibrox [against Rangers] in a pre-season friendly. So he’s only played four or five Premier League games and it’s been a huge miss and you can see what he has done to us, even today, and if you look at our results since he has come into the team it has been a big, big difference to us.
Does a part of you think West Ham would be higher up the table if Nayef Aguerd hadn’t suffered that injury?
I do, yeah. If you look at the centre-half formation we had to play in the opening four or five games of the season, we had no centre-halves with Craig Dawson injured, with Angelo Ogbonna not back from the cruciate [injury]. We were really toiling at the start of the season.
When you see Wolverhampton Wanderers and Leicester City winning, it’s turning into a really scrap at the bottom of the Premier League table isn’t it?
I think there’s an awful lot of big teams, good teams. I don’t know if nowadays, it is very rare for teams to get isolated away I think. Maybe you’ll go back on the last seasons and disprove what I’ve just said, but the feeling is the quality of the teams throughout the division is really good and in some ways it’s very difficult to say who might be 10 th , 11 th or 12 th , compared to the teams who might be 15 th or 16 th .
Is that why the point against Newcastle is actually going to be really important?
I hope so. I’ve not seen all the results yet and not seen how it worked out. Obviously I know Everton got a good result against Arsenal, so a point here [against Newcastle] with them playing so well at the moment isn’t a bad result.
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