MY ACCOUNT
West Ham cruised into the last 16 as group winners after a 1-0 win against Silkeborg IF in the Europa Conference League confirmed their qualification with a game to spare.
Manuel Lanzini tucked a penalty away in the first-half after goalkeeper Nicolai Larsen came flying out to foul Micheal Antonio.
The game was in West Ham’s control throughout but failing to double their advantage created a nervous ending.
However, David Moyes’ side did more than enough for the three points and to retain their perfect start to the competition.
Antonio led the line for the Hammers tonight and he had his say on the performance.
He said: “I feel going forward we could have been a little bit better but it is a good professional win at the end of the day and we done the job.”
The striker didn’t manage to score and spoke on his team’s general frustration in front of goal.
He said: “The only goal we scored today was by a penalty and for the football that we were playing, we probably should have scored more in open play.
“The keeper pulled off some good saves and a defender saved one off the line so on another day we could have got three.
“So we’ve got to take the positives, we got the win, and did the job that needed to be done.”
Antonio did, however, create the only goal of the game as he won the penalty that Lanzini scored.
He said: “Yeah, there was a little bit of contact but obviously in that situation he (Larsen) should not be giving me a choice to go down.”
Moyes has overseen the perfect start to life in this competition and had his say on why they couldn’t get that second goal.
He said: “You could simply put it down to poor finishing.
“I think we gave the ball away, I think we made wrong decisions in the final third, didn’t weight some passes correctly, didn’t make the cut-back well enough, didn’t pick the cross out well enough.
“Saying that, we still had chances, we had 2-3 players that probably should’ve got us a goal.”
Nayef Aguerd made his West Ham debut tonight after an injury he picked up in pre-season and Moyes gave his verdict on him fitness-wise.
He said: “What I will say is it was the perfect game to come back, it was a really good game for him. There wasn’t an awful lot of contact which meant he could play the game, control the ball.
“You could see he was flagging just after 60th minute and we took him off.”
