Roy Hodgson
A positive start and finish with goals, but what did you make of the performance overall?
Roy Hodgson said “It wasn’t good enough. It wasn’t good enough to beat West Ham, anyway. They were good and deservedly won the game. It was a positive to get off to such a good start but we didn’t capitalise – far from it. In actual fact I didn’t think our first half performance was anywhere near as good as we are capable of, and the players of course thought that as well. Everyone was determined to do better in the second half, which arguably we did but again a set play cost us dearly. The goal from the corner kick giving them a two-goal advantage was obviously going to make any hopes we had of laying siege to their goal very difficult. We tried hard, made a lot of substitutions and put attacking players on the field. Which, funnily enough, did lead to a consolation second goal right at the end but it also opened us up enormously to counter attacks. I thought there were lots of situations in there in the game where I was fearing that West Ham are going to aggravate the score.”
After a few games without a goal, how pleasing was it to see Wilfried Zaha and Michy Batshuayi on the score sheet?
Roy Hodgson said “I’m afraid it’s scant consolation. Of course I’m always pleased to see players on the scoresheet, but you really want to see your players on the scoresheet when you’ve won the game or maybe got a good point somewhere. When they’re on the scoresheet and you’ve conceded three like we did and two of them from set plays, I find it very hard to sit here at the moment and be positive because I’m basically feeling a little bit negative about everything because I thought we were going to do better tonight than we did.”
What do you need to learn from this? One win in 10 in all competitions, how concerning is that for you?
Roy Hodgson said “It’s concerning. I can’t go back 10 games – I don’t quite know what you’re referring to there. In four games in the Premier League, we’ve lost the last two but before that we’d won one and drawn two, and the draws were away to Arsenal and at home to Leicester. So I didn’t think that was such a bad period we were in. I can’t remember what was before that, but maybe they were tough games as well, I can’t remember But again, it’s a statistic. The sort of statistic that rules our game at the moment, but it doesn’t make any difference to me in terms of what I have to do in my daily work. The daily work now is to make certain that first of all we dust ourselves down and put this result behind us as quickly as we possibly can, and the only way to do that will be to train hard and make certain when we play against Wolves on Saturday our performance is an awful lot better than it was today. Because Wolverhampton are a very good team, too, and will be quite capable of doing to us what West Ham did unless we play better and make it more difficult for them to score, and create more chances ourselves.”
Jean-Philippe Mateta joined this week. You said he wouldn’t play today, is there a chance of him playing against Wolves?
Roy Hodgson said “Yes I think so. Obviously he’ll be training with us on Thursday and Friday. He now has his visa, which was a slight problem we had to sort out. But he now has that and he’ll be training with us on Thursday and Friday, he’ll certainly be in the squad for Saturday and I’ll have to make a decision on whether he starts the game or not.”
Ray Lewington wasn’t on the touchline, we know he’s isolating – how much was he missed?
Roy Hodgson said “It’s always important to have assistant manager and first team coach with you at games, so when he’s not there, you miss him. Unfortunately he’s having to isolate at the moment because of coronavirus and we’ll have to wait until that isolation period is over before we can welcome him back. When he gets over that, and we hope that will be fairly soon, he’ll be more than welcome back on the bench, but I’ve got to be honest with you, I don’t think there’s so much more that he could have done tonight to help us because neither he nor I play, it’s the players who play and the ones who accept today that they were well below their best.”
Has he himself tested positive? Is he ok?
Roy Hodgson said “He caught the virus we think from a household member, has tested positive but he’s not feeling that bad, luckily. It’ll be a question of re-testing towards the end of his isolation period and hopefully he’ll be given the green light to join us.”
