Shoulders slumped a touch, David Moyes addressed the media after West Ham’s 4-1 loss to Aston Villa on Sunday and picked his explanatory strategy very carefully.
"I hope I'm not disrespecting them in any way," he began, "but Aston Villa are just behind the top three or four big-name teams in the Premier League. I see them as one of those teams just on the coattails of those above them."
This was masterful misdirection.
It wasn’t disrespectful at all, not a soul on earth thought it might be, and it’s got everybody talking about Villa. Four goals, Douglas Luiz breaking records, Ollie Watkins on the plane to Euro 2024, 62 points taken in 2023. The timeline is flooded with "Villa are brilliant, aren’t they?"
No doubt about it, the answer is yes. They’ve won 11 straight Premier League home games and taken the same number of points this calendar year as Arsenal… wait, we’re doing it too!
Moyes shifted the focus onto Villa in order to shift the focus away from West Ham, who were very poor on Sunday. They sat off and allowed their hosts to dictate the game in the final third, moving the ball around cleanly and concisely. Watkins missed a huge chance before Luiz scored, then scored again, and although Jarrod Bowen’s heavily deflected goal briefly brought the Hammers back into contention, they got done for two more goals not long later.
They were out-possessed, out-shot and out-played. Troublingly, those first two issues have been a theme of this season so far (the third one is naturally subjective).
On the possession front, they’re averaging just 37.9% per game - the second-lowest in the league, a touch more than Luton Town (37.1%). Regarding shots, they’ve conceded the third-most per game this season (18.2); only AFC Bournemouth (18.7) and Sheffield United (21.1) have conceded more. Their Expected Goals Against (xGA) figure (18.3) is also the third-worst, with the same two teams below them.
Put simply: They’ve been possession-shy and defensively very frail so far this term.
It’s tough to be both of those and succeed. Possession-shy teams are typically defensively solid, while frail teams either lack talent or compensate by utilising proactive, attacking, possession-based styles. Right now, West Ham aren’t completing either of those trade-offs; they’re just the bad bits of both scenarios.
Losing Declan Rice, a borderline world-class player, was certain to have an impact, but West Ham were widely praised for their summer business - this writer included - and how they went about upgrading the overall quality of the team using the money. For them to be posting relegation-level underlying defensive metrics through nine games is pretty stunning.
It begs the question: Where is the value in Moyes’ current approach? His style of football is by no means universally popular - the West Ham fanbase alone feels pretty split on him - but typically, he’s kept things tight, earned results and now won a European trophy to point to. It hasn’t always been pretty, but he’s kept them in Europe for three straight years and provided one of the best nights in the club’s history. The ends have justified the means.
But success moves the goalposts and resets expectations. West Ham’s primary creator, Lucas Paqueta, is a starter for Brazil and in the summer they signed 2/3rds of Ajax’s midfield; one sits on the bench, the other fights for his share of the ball in a team not overly fussed by having it.
Moyes may be reluctant to transition to a dominant on-ball style, but the squad quality at his disposal is starting to demand it. Mohammed Kudus is raring to go from the start; Kostas Mavropanos, a talented passing centre-back, is too. Withholding them for the sake of defensive solidity is logical, but this team is not defensively solid at all.
Something has to give, likely starting with letting Kudus loose in a starting capacity, as Moyes’ misdirections won’t have quite the same effect if these recent frailties persist.
