West Ham manager David Moyes has defended his use of substitutes after coming under fire for making a lack of them during Saturday’s 2-0 defeat to Wolves. Moyes made only three substitutions during Saturday’s 2-0 defeat to Wolves at London Stadium, two of them were a double switch on 81 minutes when Ryan Fredericks and Andriy Yarmolenko entered the fray – Wolves scored their second goal three minutes later. Moyes also failed to react to Wolves introducing speedster Adama Traore to proceedings and he would play a hand in both goals with Aaron Cresswell unable to cope with the imposing and rapid winger.
David Moyes said “I think that we have got substitutes we know that can make the difference but we have other ones we need to play at different moments in the game, As you have probably read, I was not in favour of nine substitutes, I had my own reasons and it is wrong to change the rules halfway through the season. We have people coming back from injury that we haven’t seen enough, some of them can do with game time if they can get it but in the position we are in, I can just give people opportunities out of the blue. They need to be ready and at the right level as we need to pick up the points. This is my opinion individually, I think at the moment football and the way it gets played is that the real committed players are finding it harder, There aren’t as many challenges, there aren’t as many tackles going in. I think the flair players will make the difference, we need to individually do something. In truth, until they brought Traore on we had just about dealt with them and they have flair ones too. This is where we want Felipe to be that player for us, or a Michail Antonio, a Manuel Lanzini – they are the players we need to make the difference. We have plenty of players that do good things, but when it comes in the final third you need people to make the difference. We saw it with Spurs and [Steven] Bergwijn, you need people who individually can do things.”
