When asked to appraise his team's current form David Moyes said: “It makes me feel really good because I’ve always said I want to be the best and the hardest team to play against – when teams don’t enjoy playing me. When I was brought up at Celtic, it was always about winning, first and foremost. Then it was about winning with style, and then when you get a good style, they wanted lots of goals. So I feel like my whole background has been in that. “But when you don’t always have the best players and not always the best, maybe way of playing, then I have to find a way of winning. At the moment, I am really fortunate. I have a talented group of players; we’ve brought in some players who have helped that. So I feel we are playing a good style. I want us to be attacking and entertaining, but I also want to be defensive and ruthless when we have to be.”
Having done the 'hard yards' as a youngster, Moyes is well placed to understand exactly how to bring on youth players, a trait that he has exploited throughout his managerial career. At West Ham he has made his own good fortune through a combination of excellent planning and a lot of hard work on the training ground, his ideas being implemented by his superb coaching assistants.
An added bonus for all the hard work and attention to detail is the extraordinary amount of seriously good young players emerging from the Academy, AT ALL levels! Moyes will obviously still be looking in the transfer market for players, but he WILL utilise the youth players at EVERY given opportunity when possible. This will save the club an enormous amount of money in the future, but more importantly it gives fans something to believe in, and not just in 'one of our own', we're talking about more like FIVE of our own and counting! - Ed
Comments
A match made in heaven...
Thanks for another inspiring post and with it, bit by bit the Big Picture is coming into focus. I have thought long and hard about this and have finally concluded something which Moyes made clear at the time of his appointment, is what he intended to make happen at this club.
Once Moyes was appointed (second time), many thought that it was a marriage of convenience where Moyes simply needed a post as he was a manager without a job and the reason why the owners re-appointed him was because he had got them out of a fix once before.
I totally agree that there are MORE than just a couple of youth Academy products on their way through to the first team (Baptiste, Ashby, Elese, Chesters...) as opportunity seems to have fuelled our youngster’s progression and this effect can be seen already with the performance levels within the Academy players. Our player acquisitions of Okoflex, Nevers and Ekwah have also had a huge impact already and a couple of those at the least, can't be far away from making their first team debuts.
I have also been keeping an eye on our youngsters who have been loaned out and Mipo's loan spell hasn't been very good to date. Sometimes it can be down to the manager of the loan club, but ultimately the manager has got a player in because he feels that the player can add to his squad. Personally, I didn't see the basic hunger and aggression that you need from a striker when Mipo got his chance against Man U, and so far it doesn’t seem like he has managed to add that to his game as he is currently struggling at Huddersfield. Let's hope that something clicks for him soon.