Favouring patience over 'sexy' quick-fix delivers cause for optimism for David Moyes and West Ham
David Sullivan and David Gold know very well that sex sells, but while the adult industry and Ann Summers made them millionaires, the cheap thrills have been all too infrequent as West Ham United co-owners.
Which is why, perhaps, David Moyes, who admits that being a football manager who likes to build a squad is not considered “sexy”, is proving to be an effective yin to Sullivan and Gold’s yang.
This is the first time Moyes has been given the opportunity to take an English club into a second season since leaving Everton for Manchester United in 2013.
After the last game of his first spell in charge of West Ham, before being informed the club wanted to “move in a different direction”, Moyes warned that the grass was not always greener, and the record books back that up. The win percentages of his successors at United and Sunderland, Louis van Gaal and Simon Grayson, were lower than the Scotsman’s. Manuel Pellegrini initially improved on Moyes’s 13th-placed finish by three positions in his first season at West Ham, but, by the time Sullivan and Gold were forced to admit their mistake and reappoint the 57-year-old, West Ham were one point above the relegation zone.
“You need to give the owners immense credit for, after having me and choosing not to take me, being big enough to come back and say ‘hey, you did a good job and we got it wrong’,” said Moyes.
Having once again kept West Ham in the Premier League, the signs are promising that Moyes is building something in his second season that may finally provide some lasting sense of pleasure if Sullivan and Gold can resist the temptation to look for the next quick fix.
“I always believed that I could do the job and given the right opportunity and right club, I could do a really good job,” said Moyes. “It is a difficult thing to ask for time. Quite often, when maybe it has looked as though it has been tough, I have not been given time.
“I will go back to my Everton days when the first year we did well, the second year not so well, the third well, the fourth not quite so well. But by that time we had the stability, from then on the next seven to eight years we finished in the top six, maybe fifth or seventh, always in those areas.
“I don’t see how you can do that when you don’t have big, big chunks of cash and if you are a club trying to build it takes time. Obviously, it is not that sexy to say that and that is when you need good owners.”
Eight points from six games may not represent a spectacular start, but two wins and two draws against Wolverhampton Wanderers, Leicester City, Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester City, ahead of Saturday's trip to Liverpool, should be a cause for optimism.
“I thought we did a good enough job the first time to build on it,” said Moyes. “I see similarities this time, but I tried to say ‘look we can’t do everything as quick as you [the board] would like to do. We need to try to buy correctly, not everybody can be a £20 million or £30 million signing and can we try to build a West Ham team for the future?’ And I think they like the thought of it as well. They would like a side that can get better. We would all like instant success, but I think in the Premier League it is not that easy to do. You have to build.”
Perhaps even more encouraging than the early results this season have been the impacts of the players that have joined West Ham since Moyes returned to the club. January signings Jarrod Bowen and Tomas Soucek played key roles in last season’s survival, while right-back Vladimir Coufal looks a shrewd acquisition with Said Benrahma and Craig Dawson waiting to make their debuts.
Just as he reinvigorated Marko Arnautovic during his first spell, Moyes has brought out the best in Michail Antonio and West Ham will miss the converted striker, who has scored 12 goals since the end of February, while he is out with a hamstring injury.
“Both the Davids have given me as much control as I would possibly want,” said Moyes. “Obviously, I don’t sign the cheques to pay for it, but all I can do is recommend and say what I think we should bring in, what I think would give us a chance, and they have been very, very good.
“We tried for several players in the window and we didn’t quite get one or two centre halves we were after, but, in truth, we have tried really hard to improve, and we are trying to do it in a better fashion. We are trying to be as correct as we can. There is nobody who can get everything right all the time, that’s impossible, but I think we are trying to do it with a bit more design and looking at it a lot harder.”
Everton had struggled in the bottom half of the table before Moyes took over in 2002 and gradually got the club moving upwards, eventually qualifying for Europe. That same template looks a wise one for West Ham to try to follow.
“My ambition is to start to take West Ham closer to that, but at the moment, after you’re avoiding relegation year in, year out, it’s very hard to look that far ahead,” said Moyes. “I have to look towards something, but I can’t promise the supporters I can get that because we’re not in that position yet.
“But I’m hoping in the future, that’s the direction we’ve got to look and got to go. There’s no point us saying ‘we’re going to win the league’ because that’s completely unrealistic, but we have to try to find a way of moving up the League, getting a stability, not feeling we are a club who every year or every second or third year, we’re bobbing around the bottom and relegation, we’ve got to try to change that.
“At the moment, we’ve not changed that, we’ve only played five or six games this season. But I sense something different, I sense a different group of players, I sense a different feel around the club.”
