Sunderland Echo

No pressure after first victory – Pellegrini

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West Ham manager Manuel Pellegrini insists he did not feel under any undue pressure by their four-match losing start to the season.

The Hammers ended their dismal run with a deserved 3-1 win at Everton to move out of the bottom three with only their third victory over the Toffees in 21 meetings.

“In football you are always under pressure,” said the Chilean, who was celebratin­g his 65th birthday.

“Because we won, we are not going to have pressure. For me, the pressure is the same in every game, the pressure to win.

“I have a lot of communicat­ion with the owners, of course they were not happy, but they never have any doubt about what we are doing.

“I am very happy with the performanc­e: first because this is a very difficult stadium to win, second because the players didn’t have any doubts.”

Pellegrini was rewarded for handing £17.5million summer signing Andriy Yarmolenko his full Premier League debut with two goals from the Ukraine internatio­nal to put the Hammers 2-0 up just past the half hour.

Gylfi Sigurdsson’s header pulled one back a minute before the interval, but Marko Arnautovic’s second half strike confirmed Everton’s first defeat of the season.

“He didn’t arrive here ready to play,” added Pellegrini.

“He has a lot of quality and he always demonstrat­ed it, but we preferred to work with him for a couple of weeks.”

Everton manager Marco Silva was left to rue costly errors.

“We didn’t perform in our level to win this match. I already told our players,” he said.

“In this level you cannot make mistakes like we made. When you create chances you have to score.

“After the first mistake we made we didn’t react like we had to react and it looks like the game changed completely and we lost our confidence.”

At 2-0 down Silva substitute­d Morgan Schneiderl­in, whose father died in the week, a minute before half-time, but the Toffees boss insisted his decision was a tactical one.

“I know what has happened, but he was ready to play,” he added.

“It is not because of what happened or because of the performanc­e of Morgan. He told me he was ready to play and he has all my support.”

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