David Moyes
What did you make of the VAR decisions tonight?
I’m going to sadly say that I’ve genuinely not seen any of the incidents at the moment. I’ve come away from it and not seen them, I probably should have looked before I came out. Obviously Bournemouth are disappointed with how it went. I generally couldn’t tell you, I don’t know. What I would say is that the performance merited probably better goals than we scored and I don’t think that there was any doubt that we were the better side and we probably deserved to win the game. I thought our play merited better than what we finished. I thought our finishing and final pass or final shot or through ball didn’t quite come off as well as we would have liked.
How pleased were you with Said Benrahma’s performance?
Really pleased because he’s so important for us. We need him. He’s a dribbler, you don’t get many dribblers any more, he wants to take people on but as you know, people who watch West Ham regularly and come to the game, it is his final product. Whether it is a cross, a pass or his finish, so we’ve been trying to get him continually on to it. I’ll tell you what he does do, every year he always supplies us goals, I think last year he probably got six or seven and probably six or seven assists as well. He plays a big part, but his form has been in and out and we’re trying to get a little bit more consistency from him. I have to say, he played really well tonight, we felt it was a game at home like this under the lights and we thought it was a night where maybe he would have a chance to take people on and dribble and I thought he did really well.
Was Said Benrahma always going to take the penalty?
No, it probably wasn’t, no. He took it brilliantly well, so well done.
A rare goal for Kurt Zouma too?
Good, I’m pleased Kurt got a goal because we bought him partly knowing he had that ability, we saw him do it for Chelsea. I’m hoping he can get a few more for us. Overall, Kurt was nice and steady apart from maybe the last 15 or 20 minutes when they went a little bit more direct, put us under a little bit of pressure. We’d sort of looked as if we’d stopped playing and stopped trying to get the goal at that period and trying to get the second goal, we nearly sat off it a little bit, let them back into the game a bit. But, we had done enough, we should have done enough to see the game out by that time.
For what you are trying to build at the London Stadium, how important was it to make it five straight home wins in all competitions since moving here?
I’m really pleased because we’ve had a slow start, we’re aware of that and the questions tonight could have been very different if we hadn’t won. That’s what a manager’s job is like, it’s a tightrope. We’ve got ourselves in a decent position after having a poor start to the season and now our job is to claw back and our job is to get on the shirt tails of those above us and see if we can catch them up over the coming weeks and months.
Psychologically, how much of a lift is it to climb to tenth from 17th?
Huge lift, nobody wants to be there so let’s not kid anybody one, we don’t want to be there. We want to get away but we need to pick up and I think we’ve probably deserved more points this season than we’ve got. We’ve had a bundle of bad decisions as well, I know you’ve asked me about VAR but we’ve had a bundle of them as well which we could sort of put to the table if we get questioned. But, we need to be more clinical in the way that we play and I think we played very well at times tonight. Some of our football was excellent, but then we didn’t get a clean strike or we didn’t pick the cross out to get somebody a finish. That was the bits for me when I thought just let me down a little bit.
