Former West Ham United manager David Moyes has spoken out on the exact moment he was told he wasn’t going to be kept on as Hammers boss.
The Scot was brought in mid-way through last season and tasked with keeping the beleaguered East London outfit in the top flight after a shocking run of form under Slaven Bilic. He accomplished that task but was still let go this summer.
Now he’s had his say: “We thought we done a really good job at West Ham last year,” Moyes told beIN SPORTS. “It was a difficult club at the time, there was strange situations, but we felt that we got the result.
“It [his departure] was more to do with getting told the day after the last game of the season, we’d just beat Everton actually on the last day of the season, that they would be going for someone else. So we weren’t really aware of it prior to that. We felt we’d done a really good job at West Ham and deserved to stay in place if we’d chosen to do so.”
David Moyes reveals how his was pushed out of West Ham despite doing "a really good job" last season.#beINPL #WHUFC ? HD11 pic.twitter.com/1LkKr1jrp2
— beIN SPORTS (@beINSPORTS_EN) March 17, 2019
OPINION
You can, partly, see where Moyes is coming from here. He was given a remit and he succeeded in the task that he was given. He was told he had to keep the club in the Premier League at any cost and he did that. So from that point of view he is right to be frustrated at being let go in the summer. On the other hand, though, the football he had the Hammers playing was less than ideal. We know that this is a club that likes to play an attractive style of football, and Moyes isn’t really associated with that same brand of football. He is a pragmatic man, whereas West Ham wanted someone a bit more free-flowing in their footballing philosophy. They got that with Manuel Pellegrini, but the results of their decision have been a bit up and down. For all the money the Chilean spent over the summer you could argue that he has underachieved this term. It’s interesting to imagine what Moyes could have done with that kind of cash in East London, but it appears we’ll never know.