Michail Antonio on...

His England call-up

I had set myself the goal of getting in the England squad (when I joined West Ham) but I didn’t say within a year. In my mind I gave myself two years to get into the team because I believed that I would get in there. But it’s happened a year ahead of what I thought. And I’ve not played yet so my next goal is to play. It was a great experience, just watching the boys, seeing how they perform. And it was strange. I’ve gone to a changing room with a bunch of boys I’ve only played against. In other changing rooms you’ve trained together for months, you’ve done everything with them. It was quite laid back and chilled and the football was quality.

His run of five headed goals

I don’t know what it is. The ball keeps coming to my head! It’s just magnetically drawn to my head! And it keeps ending up in the net. Growing up I always wanted to score or I wanted to assist. And I keep driving for that. I always look at my stats. I know my stats are high for scoring and before my assists were always higher. Not assisting as much as I’m scoring is annoying me. It’s bothering me. Even though I have five goals I want a couple of assists with those. At least two. So that’s my next mission, to get my assists up.

West Ham’s slow start

It’s not that we’re not scoring goals, it’s that we’re not stopping people scoring. We were very resilient last season and it’s the exact same players we had. So we need to get that resilience back. It’s not just defensively. It’s as a team. Work together. Slide across the field, make sure we’re not broken down At the Boleyn the fans were on top of us and other teams would get intimidated. The pitch was small. We could hunt the opposition. It was intense. Now at the London Stadium there are a lot more people and when we came out for the first game the fans were deafening — especially when I scored. But the pitch is bigger and it’s harder to press. But over time we’ll get used to doing it and getting on top of people and we’ll work it out. There’s still the same intensity in the team. We’ve only played four games there and it is quite new to us as well. As the season goes on we will get used to it, adapt to it better and be better at home.