Our wait for a first away win of the Premier League campaign continued, as we fell to a 2-1 defeat at the London Stadium against West Ham.
Despite Jacob Murphy opening the scoring in the 4th minute, we were second best during the first half, as a long range strike from Lucas Paqueta and unfortunate deflection off Sven Botman gave the Hammers all three points.
And the second half was amongst our most toothless performances since the takeover, as the substitutions of Nick Woltemade and Anthony Gordon meant we barely troubled Alphonse Areola. Tomas Soucek grabbed a third in stoppage time to make it 3-1.
Eddie Howe will have some big decisions to make ahead of Wednesday night’s Champions League clash against Athletic Bilbao. Here’s what he had to say after today’s game:
Howe has called for everyone involved in today’s 3-1 defeat to West Ham to take a look at themselves, him included, and work out what went wrong after our Premier League away form went from bad to worse in the Capital.
The boss admitted he had no defence for that display, insisting it was a day where everyone was off; not just ‘one or two’ players:
“I can’t really defend that performance. It was really disappointing especially after that start.”
“We let West Ham back in with some uncharacteristic errors. It wasn’t any one or two players, it was collectively we were off today and you could see that it was quite evident in our first half performance.”
“I think that’s the harsh realities of football. You can win three games previously and think you’ve turned a corner in terms of consistency, then it slaps you in the face. So that’s what’s happened to us today.”
“We gave ourselves problems and it caught up with us. We have missed another big opportunity in the Premier League today.”
“All of us, collectively, need to analyse ourselves and see where we can improve
Frustration looks to be growing in scores of the travelling fanbase. Three consecutive 0-0s followed by back-to-back defeats against Brighton and now West Ham means we’re still winless on the road, with just two goals to our name in that time.
Howe knows that we need to up our away form as soon as possible, and has called upon the lads to play every game like we are at home for the sake of the committed supporters following the club up and down the country.
“Whatever environment we play in, whether it’s home or away, if we have the support with us or against us, we have to find a way to perform better than we did today.”
“There’s no excuses. Hands up from us, that wasn’t good enough and we’ll look to do better next time.”
On paper, this should have been a routine win against the team with the second worst defensive record in the league.
But today’s loss felt eerily similar to the game at St James’ Park last season, where Julen Lopetegui’s side turned up and took all three points and we were uncharacteristically poor.
“We were disappointing by our high standards we’ve stuck to lately, and the performance wasn’t a good one.”
“Going a goal up was obviously a great start, and Murph scores a great goal, and then you expect to go on from that and use the positivity of the goal, but we didn’t.”
“I felt we regressed in our performance. We sort of got worse as that first half went on. We did half time, we tried to reshuffle things, but to no avail today.”
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