Few positives to take, says Zaba

  • by Staff Writer
  • Wednesday, 25th September 2019

Pablo Zabaleta apologised to the supporters who made their way to Oxford tonight - only to see West Ham humiliated, once again, by a lower league team.

The experienced former Argentinian international made a rare appearance as West Ham were thrashed by a team two divisions below them in the football pyramid.

And he admitted that the team's performance was way below par and simply not acceptable for a team with European aspirations.




"I thought it was a poor performance from everyone," he told West Ham's website. "We still need to learn how to play those games, especially when you come from a big win like that against Manchester United last Sunday.

"This was a completely different game against a League One team that play a different kind of football where the intensity is higher. That’s why you have to perform well enough to win those games.

"If you look at the performance tonight, it’s not been anywhere near our standard and also the way we lost was not good.

"We're sorry about the performance tonight and sorry for the away fans who came to the game, because obviously we don’t want our fans to see this kind of performance. It was a bad night."

West Ham joined the likes of Tottenham, Sheffield United and Bournemouth in being beaten by lower league opposition in the Carabao Cup's third round - although none suffered quite such an embarrassing result as the Irons.

And Zabaleta suggested that some of the Premier League's elite simply may not possess the correct temperament or sufficient determination for matches of this nature.

"We are not the first Premier League team to be knocked out of the League Cup," he added. "We saw Spurs and some other Premier League teams struggling to win games like that.

"We just need to move on now. There are few positives we can take from this game, obviously, so we must look at the mistakes we made today and think about Saturday.

"It's the Premier League again and we don’t have too much time to recover. In 48 hours or so we have another game and we need to be stronger mentally on Saturday."

* Something to say about this story? Please visit the KUMB Forum to leave a comment.



More News