NO SILVA LINING TO CLOUD AT WATFORD

morning, ‘You’ll play in the team if you make goals and score goals but, if you don’t run for the team, then you don’t play either.

“I can accept one or the other. If you are making goals and scoring goals, and the team is winning, then I might not need so much of the other.

“I can only go on what people have told me, and they didn’t think he has come up to the standard he set at Stoke City. I watched him a lot at Stoke. I thought he looked like the sort of player you would never be keen to play against.

“But he also has to be a team player. The clips I have seen at times, he has not looked a team player. He would not be the only one I would say that about. The other players also have to do the work for the team, if they want to be part of it.”

Moyes, who said he has inherited an imbalanced squad, with “four or five people who want to play wide left”, eventually wants his players to take “responsibility” for performances. But, in the short-term, he wants hard work.

Standards had slipped under Slaven Bilic with poor time-keeping and training reflected on match days.

At Sunderland, the feisty Scot quickly drowned in defeatism. In London, he will be different.

“I’m not going to be pandering to any needs,” he added. “I can’t be bothered. If anybody says they can’t get back from international duty, well don’t think you will be coming in and playing Saturday.

“It’s that sort of thing. It can’t happen any longer. You do the work, the training, the running back, the running forward – you do that, then you’ve got a chance of getting selected.

“I have said, ‘Don’t come whingeing to me if you get it more intense, or we are harder with you, or you are getting pushed, and we are asking you to run because the stats don’t lie either.

“I need results quickly. So I am not pussyfooting around with them.” MARCO SILVA has refused to commit himself to Watford beyond this weekend – and he wants owner Gino Pozzo to thrash out his future with Everton.

Pozzo has already binned two approaches from Goodison Park for permission to speak with Silva about succeeding Ronald Koeman – with Everton owners Bill Kenwright and Farhad Moshiri offering £10million compensation.

But 12 games into his two-year contract, Silva has no release clause – and Everton would have to cough up a record settlement for a manager to prise the ambitious Portuguese coach away from Vicarage Road in mid-season.

Facing the music for the first time since the first smoke signals from Merseyside became a choking black cloud in Hertfordshire, Silva failed to declare his unqualified loyalty to Watford time and again.

He left little scope for doubt that Everton’s package of £4m-a-year plus a £70m transfer kitty in January was too big to be ignored.

But he is reluctant to force the issue by resigning – because he is aware of the potential damage to his reputation if he walks out at the first sign of a better offer from elsewhere.

Silva claimed: “I am working as normal and at the moment I don’t know if there has been an offer or not, or what has happened.

“This is the moment for the owners to talk to each other about the situation, but Everton is not the club where I work. I can tell you Everton is a big club, nothing more.”

Asked if he wanted to talk to the sickly Toffees – three wins and six defeats in 11 Premier League games – Silva was more evasive than a politician on Question Time.

He said: “I don’t answer this question because I read many things during the week. The media wrote that I didn’t want to talk to anybody, then they said I did.

“What I want to do is talk with my owner, the board and my players as well, nobody else. I do my job normally, like the first day I came here.”

So this is your last match as Watford manager, then?

“Why are you sure about that? I really don’t know.”

Only when Mirror Sport asked if he was prepared, as a matter of principle, to force his exit from Vicarage Road by resigning mid-term, did he squirm before insisting: “That’s a good question...

“It’s not a matter of resigning or not. Let me think... I didn’t do that before. At Olympiakos, I had a fantastic relationship with everybody, and I finished the season I had started.

“We talked at the end of the season and finished the situation.

“For us, the speculation doesn’t change anything. We will continue to do our work and prepare well for West Ham.

“Everybody has worked hard, with a good commitment to take a good result on Sunday. We want to play straight and fast.”

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