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David Moyes admitted that he was disappointed with West Ham's performance - despite watching his team rack up an 18th win in their last 20 European outings.

Tomas Soucek's 88th-minute striker was enough to secure a fourth successive win in all competitions for the Hammers, who now need to avoid defeat at home to Freiburg in their final game of the group phase in order to qualify automatically for the Round of 16.




Yet despite having made seven changes to his starting XI, the manager was distictly unhappy with certain aspects of the performance. "It looked to me as if it would be nil-nil and we weren’t going to score, because we weren’t creative enough and we didn’t do enough,"said Moyes reflecting on the 1-0 win.

"They played five at the back and made it really hard, but I was more disappointed with the first half because we gave them a few chances, which I didn’t like.

But as it went on we limited them to fewer opportunities and we looked like, if we got a chance, we might take one. We got there in the end. It’s another away win in Europe in the bag and I’ll take that and go back home with it."

On the vast number of changes introduced to the team, Moyes revealed that he was keen to give minutes to those players who have spent much of the season so far kicking their heels on the bench due to the busy forthcoming fixture list, which will see the Hammers play 11 games in 33 days ahead of the New Year.

"We wanted to give players who haven’t played chances to play," he confirmed. "We did that at Olympiacos and we’ve done it tonight, because I want to keep the squad together and keep them fit.

"We’re going into a really busy period and I’m going to need some of them to play at different times, so it gives me a chance to see how they are and how they’re performing.




"Some of them are going to have to step up and play better, and we know that. It’s a bit easier to be critical when we win than when we lose and we need to play better than we did tonight.

"We had some good moments at times, but we never really punctured or threatened them and got our centre forwards in positions to score - so that was a disappointment."

And looking ahead to the winner-takes-all tie against Freiburg - who West Ham have already beaten 2-1 away from hom - Moyes knows his team are in for a tough test.

"It’s not going to be easy against Freiburg," he warned. "It’s certainly not been easy qualifying for Europe three years in a row and getting to the latter stages, so if we could win the group, it would be great because it would give us a couple less games in February time.

If you’d said to me at the start of the competition when I saw the group, would I take finishing second in the group and being in Europe, I’d have done that no problem. We’re still top of the group and I want to stay there so what we need is a big night at the stadium with a big crowd behind us so that we can try and win the group.

"That would be good."




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