Premier League survival is within touching distance for Moyes’ Boys. Victories over Southampton, Fulham and Bournemouth last month, plus an excellent point against Arsenal after being two down, helped to drag us away from danger.
But defeats at home to Newcastle, where we seemingly made a season’s worth of mistakes in one game, and away at Palace, where their attackers terrorised our defence, were big disappointments. Although we lost to Liverpool, we caused them problems and should have taken something away from the game.
I saw enough in April to give me confidence that we would stay up, but I’d really like us to kick on now and finish midtable. The problem that we face in closing in on that magical 40-point benchmark is we face both Manchester clubs and bogey team Brentford.
This means we’ll certainly need to take something from our final two games against Leeds and Leicester and this concerns me. My hope is that other results go our way between now and our final two games to reduce the pressure on us.
We’ve also got the small matter of our second European semi final in two seasons. We’ll fancy our chances of making the final but we need to make sure we put our stamp on both legs. If we do the business against AZ Alkmaar, I think it’s a real shame that our first major cup final since 2006 is being held in a stadium with a capacity of 20,000.
There will be tens of thousands of West Ham fans in Prague and it’s a shame that so few will be inside the stadium.
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