David Moyes appeared to be paying his West Ham team a backhanded compliment when he posited last week that they may well have become simply a good cup team.
The context was a comprehensive win over Arsenal that sent the Hammers into the quarter-finals of the Carabao Cup. Heading into Thursday's meeting with Olympiacos, they are top of their Europa League group, too, well on course to play knockout football on the continent for a third season in a row.
The insinuation from Moyes, though, was that while his team are capable of showpiece victories, they lack the consistency required at the tasty end of the Premier League, a suspicion borne out now by a run of three successive defeats and the fact that triumphs over Sheffield United and Luton represent their only League wins since August.
While accepting things must improve on that front, however, is being a better knockout side really such a woe? There was an era of English football, before qualifying for Europe became most clubs’ main goal, when being a good cup team was the aspiration of many; the gap between the best and the rest not so vast as to make claiming the odd scalp en route to Wembley such an unlikely event.
Things have changed, clearly — the most successful English cup team of recent years is the same one that has won the League five times out of six — but if any club in the top-flight is positioned to challenge the assertion (one still parroted by Moyes himself) that the Premier League must be put first and foremost, it may well be this West Ham.
Last term was dominated by fear of relegation, yet ended as the club’s most memorable in decades, Europa Conference League success ending a 43-year trophy drought and delivering Moyes the first silverware of his career. In all, since the start of last season, the Hammers have won 24 games in cup competitions and only 15 League ones.
“To be a manager you want to be a really good league team,” Moyes insisted on Wednesday. “[But] we all know that to try and win the league or have success in the league is really difficult, so the cups play a really big part in keeping the supporters happy.
"Last year, I needed the cup games, because [the] league form wasn’t good enough. The cup games kept us bubbling along and by the end we had our best season for a long time.”
Last year the cup games kept us bubbling along, and by the end we had our best season for a long time
The experience of Prague must surely have whet the appetite among manager, players and fans alike and, indeed, when Moyes does eventually walk away from West Ham, it will be that night, not the sixth- and seventh-placed finishes of campaigns prior, that defines his legacy.
In a Premier League season when the two ends of the table look perhaps further apart than ever before, those who, like West Ham, appear destined for the middle ground have a degree of licence to train more focus than usual elsewhere.
Beat Olympiacos on Thursday night and with European football of some description post-Christmas secure, Hammers fans will have licence, too, to dream once more.
