Despite the presence of placards in the away section demanding his firing, David Moyes maintains that Nottingham Forest, not West Ham United, was under pressure at the City Ground this afternoon.
The Scottish player saw his team give up a goal to Taiwo Awoniyi in stoppage time of the first half, and then they had Kalvin Phillips sent off in the middle of the second. They would eventually lose 2-0 as a result of a Callum Hudson-Odoi goal in the dying seconds.
They now have eight games without a win across all competitions, and they are five points behind sixth-place Manchester United in the Premier League standings after that.
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With their victory, Forest moved five points clear of the bottom three and leapfrogged Crystal Palace. This is presumably the reason Moyes believed Nuno Espirito Santo’s team, who are still eight behind the Hammers, needed more help.
“Well, we’ve been sixth, and I’m not sure if you could say we’re maybe higher than you would expect. I don’t know if you believe it’s drifting. You might approach it from a different angle, Moyes said to Sky Sports.
“However, I do believe that we want to try and compete, that we want to be a team that gets into Europe every year; we’ve been playing in Europe for three years now; it would be amazing if we could make it four.”
“Look, we’re going through a rough time right now, but there are a lot of Premier League teams that have been through tough times before.” There are moments when you have to make sure that people are aware of the truth and the good things that have happened. We are doing quite well.
We’re sorry that we finished sixth and fell a few spots, but we still have the European tournament to look forward to. So, I believe Nottingham Forest was the group that was under the most pressure today.
Moyes believed that the struggle grew more difficult after Phillips was sent off for a second yellow card. “The game was quite close. It stayed close for a very long time. After 70 minutes, the sending off didn’t help us; it was a close game still.
“I thought the players showed wonderful energy and great endeavour to try and do something in the game, and they really, really did. We let up a goal right on half time, which was extremely frustrating.
They really put in a great effort to try and win today; we were just short, but that’s the Premier League; anything can happen.
“I thought we had a pretty decent build up from the back and through the middle third, but we just lacked quality in the latter third of the game today.
“I felt that we had a few opportunities, so probably the last third was where we let ourselves down more than anywhere else today. We made the incorrect decisions two or three times to maybe slide people in who could have scored or got better [placed].” However, as I mentioned, I felt the players performed admirably for large stretches of the game.
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