Kouyate bags first point for Moyes
WEST HAM...1 LEICESTER...1
STRANGE as it sounds, the most important thing here was for West Ham not to lose. They may have been at home for David Moyes’ second game in charge but given the atmosphere around the place this season, that is not necessarily an advantage.
So from that point of view, the Moyes regime is up and running. He has his first point, his first goal and his team were able to leave the field at the London Stadium with no verbal assault to the ear drums.
The basic facts of a good game are that West Ham started terribly — Marc Albrighton scoring after a dreadful error from home defender Angelo Ogbonna — but then got better to such an extent that they could have won. They were the ones pushing hard at the death.
Cheikhou Kouyate had headed the equaliser just before half-time and it was deserved. Before and after that, Moyes’ team were the dominant force and it will be this — the way they reacted to early adversity — that will have encouraged him.
When West Ham went behind here a few Fridays ago to Brighton, they collapsed. It was clear that night that Moyes’ predecessor Slaven Bilic was all but finished.
Here, they gathered themselves and found a way to respond. So credit to Moyes. After the misery of defeat at Watford, the Scot has found a way to galvanise his players.
There are holes in this team, that is for sure. Andy Carroll is a problem up front while Pablo Zabaleta’s creaking bones are not entirely compensated for by game intelligence any more. But those are problems that will have to be addressed over the long term.
Here we saw signs of a short-term fix, some repair to confidence and a return to some basic principles of the game.
We saw some of what Moyes had asked for — hard work and courage — and much of what we always see from the former Manchester United manager’s teams. There were crosses — lots and lots of crosses — and the full width of the pitch used.
If anybody should benefit from Moyes’ stewardship, it really should be Carroll. He certainly will not want for service over the coming weeks.
As for the home crowd, they responded to what they saw. By the end they were roaring their team on through six minutes of added time and had Andre Ayew’s overhead kick been slightly lower then we could have had the kind of glorious finish this stadium used to witness in the days before the footballers moved in.
An hour and a half before that things had been much different. West Ham started so badly that Moyes must have felt like weeping. For a while after Albrighton’s eighth-minute goal, he sat still in his seat as though wondering whether he could slip away without anybody noticing.
West Ham actually had five players in the area when Jamie Vardy found space down the left to cross low towards the penalty spot. Leicester, for their part, had only two players arriving. So the odds were firmly with West Ham but nobody had accounted for the fact that Ogbonna would lose his footing.
Attempting to clear a ball heading straight for him, the West Ham defender missed it completely and had hardly crashed to ground by the time Albrighton, arriving from the right, stretched to side foot it back across goalkeeper Joe Hart and in to the corner of the goal.
Had Ogbonna stayed upright there would have been no goal so from that point of view there was little Moyes could have done about it in the days leading up to the game. You can coach and organise and motivate your players all that you like but if they fall over, they simply fall over.
So a goal down in front of a fan base primed to revolt, West Ham faced a real challenge. This was the worst possible start.
But the response over the course of the game was good. West Ham looked vulnerable to Leicester’s quick counters and Vardy and Riyad Mahrez came close to stretching the lead.
The more assertive, dominant team was West Ham, though, and there had already been a couple of headed chances before Kouyate nodded in a corner off the shoulder of Leicester defender Danny Simpson seconds before the break.
That goal, a poor one for Leicester to concede, enabled West Ham to be ambitious in the second half. Occasionally they were failed by a lack of quality and they did not create clear chances. But players such as Marko Arnautovic were much improved.
For Moyes there is something to work on, the feeling of steps taken forward. A visit to his old club Everton awaits on Wednesday. There is no escape from the glare of the lights.