|
Let’s try to keep this one positive lads ⚒️⚒️
David Moyes interview: We talk about mental health but it’s still OK to discuss a manager’s job as if it’s a jokey matter
The first word that comes to mind when I think of David Moyes is “genuine”. Anyone who has spent time with him will tell you the same. He’s engaging, funny but, above all, genuine.
I’ve been in his company at various events and he was one of the assessors when I did my UEFA A Licence coaching badge in Largs, up in Ayrshire. That was when he was at Everton, but he had so much time for those of us doing the course. His interest in every single one of us was genuine.
That’s why so many people in football were so pleased for him when, having built his reputation at Preston North End and Everton, he was handpicked by Sir Alex Ferguson to take over as Manchester United manager in 2013. It’s why so many people were so keen for him to do well at Old Trafford.
As we all know, it didn’t work out. He signed a six-year contract but he was sacked after ten months and there were an awful lot of people lining up to take potshots at David, particularly when his next two jobs, at Real Sociedad and Sunderland, didn’t go to plan either.
People called him yesterday’s man. They tried to rewrite history about his time at Everton. He was labelled as the man who failed at Manchester United and it seemed like the experience was going to haunt him for the rest of his career.
From the moment he was sacked by Manchester United in April 2014, there were 12 months in Spain with Real Sociedad, 10 unhappy months at Sunderland, which ended in relegation, and a very decent six-month stint as interim manager at West Ham United, at the end of which they replaced him with Manuel Pellegrini. Eleven years at Everton followed by six and a half years where he spent more time out of work than in work.
After being released by West Ham in May 2018 — harshly, I thought — he was out of work for 19 months. Looking back, I find that astounding. There were offers, but nothing quite at the level he was looking for until West Ham came calling again in late December 2019.
And look at them now. Not only did he steer them clear of relegation, but he followed that by leading them to sixth place in the Premier League last season, just two points behind Chelsea in fourth. Right now they’re seventh, but still in the hunt for Champions League qualification and, even better, through to the Europa League quarter-final after a magnificent victory over Sevilla.
Moyes admitted his failings at Manchester United but would have liked more time (Photo: Michael Regan/Getty Images)
For the first time in years, West Ham looks like a happy club where everyone is pulling in the same direction. The credit for that has go to David, who has pulled everyone together and instilled a work ethic that just didn’t seem to be there before.
That’s what I want to ask him about: that transformation of West Ham and the apparent transformation in him, from looking weary and beaten at Manchester United and Sunderland to looking so bullish again now as he takes West Ham from strength to strength.
We take Manchester United first. You might expect a manager to be defensive in that situation — I know certain other managers would be — but David holds his hands up and admits it didn’t work out.
“I was experienced at the time; I’d spent 11 years in the Premier League at a good level and built the club (Everton) up,” he says. “But at Manchester United, I think maybe I needed a chance to grow into it. You talk about players coming into the Premier League and needing a bit of time. It wasn’t that I needed time in the Premier League, but I needed time at the club to find myself and to find how I was going. And the truth is, I wanted just to carry on what Sir Alex had done. I couldn’t be Sir Alex, but I wanted to continue the model they had, developing young players, putting young players in the team, trying to play in a fashion that suited them. That was the idea.
“I only look back at it with great fondness, honoured that I was offered a job of that magnitude. Unfortunately, I only got ten months. I think if I’d been given a bit longer, I could have done better, but ultimately I can only blame myself because I needed to win more games.”
Why has every manager since Sir Alex found it so difficult, though? Why haven’t they even come close to challenging for the Premier League title? “I keep hearing about Man United needing a top coach to make the difference,” David says. “Man United have had Jose Mourinho and Louis van Gaal, who are two of the best coaches in the world — both excellent, both winners. One is an unbelievable coach, one a great winner. Man United have had a lot of top managers. Not putting myself in that category at all, but they’ve had some great managers. The difficulty for them now is to really find the same rhythm they found under Sir Alex, which when you look back now was incredible for their football club, it really was.
“You look back at a lot of the dynasties at football clubs — Brian Clough (at Nottingham Forest), Sir Bobby Robson at Ipswich, even Don Revie (at Leeds United). Howard Wilkinson told me, ‘If you’d spoken to me earlier, David, I would have told you anyone who goes to take these jobs tends to find it’s really difficult to make it work’. It wasn’t that I didn’t know that, but (…) because of the way Sir Alex approached me to take the job (…), it made it more personal, it made me feel like, well, yes, there’s a model here that they felt I could continue, that I would be the right person. And it wasn’t to be.”
He speaks very fondly about his time at Real Sociedad (“a great job to go to, I learned a huge amount”). Less so Sunderland, where he feels he took over a sinking ship — a club that had flirted with relegation for the previous four seasons, often relying on a new-manager “bounce” late in the campaign, and then ended up drifting into the Championship under a manager who still seemed bruised by the Manchester United experience.
He calls Sunderland his “biggest disappointment”. “When I look back at it, they had just stayed up with Big Sam (Allardyce),” he says. “But it was by the skin of their teeth. I felt I would be able to do the same. And you only have to look at what has happened to Sunderland over the years to see there were bigger troubles there. It’s not just been down to one manager or one incident, so yes I chose wrong. That’s how things can go. It didn’t go so well for me at Sunderland.”
I ask him about those low moments — about being out of work and seeing potential opportunities pass him by. “Obviously when you’re not working, you find it tough,” he says. “You always feel the criticism that you get when you leave your jobs, even if a lot of it isn’t quite correct and there’s a lot of untruths in it. You find yourself having to battle against things which you don’t think are fair, really.
“The biggest thing I did was make sure that I tried to go and retrain, relearn, keep myself busy. I think if you’re a real football person, you understand the levels people are at. People who have been professionals like yourself, players or managers in the game, understand that we can all have bad times and things can’t always go right, but I think there was a different level of media attention.”
Moyes’ transformation of West Ham has been very impressive (Photo: Warren Little/Getty Images)
How tough was it? “It’s only if you’re in the business that you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about,” he says. “There’s all the stuff we talk about with mental health nowadays, and I think we’re getting closer to understanding that, yet it’s still OK to discuss a football manager’s job on television or radio and people talk about it as if it’s a jokey matter.
“Did it have an effect? It did. But look, ultimately I’ve got a strong family, a great wife behind me, and we got through it fine. Football is a game. Sometimes it will be bad and you have to live with that, but you see what’s going on.”
I look at the contrast between his Everton team — hungry, super-fit, aggressive, so hard-working — and the Everton team I’ve seen under a succession of managers under Farhad Moshiri’s ownership. And it strikes me that this is pretty much the opposite of the transformation West Ham have undergone under David’s management. These days it’s West Ham who are cited as an example for other teams to follow and Everton where we find ourselves questioning the spirit and the sense of direction.
Does the situation at Goodison Park sadden him? “Yes, because Everton has always been close (to my heart) and always will be because I was there so long — 11 years. It’s a long time to be at a club and we went through a lot together,” he says. “Obviously you’ll know I had a great relationship with the owners — Sir Philip Carter and then Bill Kenwright.
“They’ve spent an awful lot of money and it feels as if it hasn’t really taken on. But I don’t think that should be a shock to anybody in football because I think you see it at a lot of clubs, where clubs spend money and… even West Ham a couple of years ago spent a lot of money to try to challenge, but there’s a way you have to go about it. I think Leicester City for example has been a good model of how you build. It doesn’t mean you’re going to have success all the time. I’m disappointed for Everton, but ultimately at the moment my job is at West Ham.”
David says he was “very, very close” to returning to Everton at one stage and, while he would probably have been seen as a less glamorous appointment than Ronald Koeman, Carlo Ancelotti or Rafa Benitez, or even Marco Silva, their fans might look at the job he has done at West Ham and think they could have done with a dose of that. Either way, it seems fair to say Everton’s loss has been West Ham’s gain.
“It has been a great move for me and I’m really enjoying it — a great group of players, a really good club with huge potential,” he says. “I’m so glad I was given a second chance at West Ham because the first time I was here they didn’t keep me.”
Did it hurt or surprise him when they moved him on and appointed Pellegrini instead? “Yes,” he says. “I actually thought we’d done a decent job. We’d done enough and I’d started to make plans to prep for the new season and all the things that were going on, so I was surprised — I’ve got to say — that we didn’t.
“But I had no problem with David Sullivan when he picked up the phone and said to me about coming back. I had no problem at all. He was big enough to do that. He never said he made a mistake (laughs) but he was big enough to come back to me and I’ve got to say it’s been a really good chance for me and I’ve been grateful for the opportunity.”
The West Ham that David joined, on both occasions, struck me as an unhappy, dysfunctional club. There was a lot of animosity from the fans towards the owners and a lot of negativity towards the new stadium. These frustrations can be overcome when the team is playing well and results are good, but West Ham were playing terribly. They were 18th when they appointed him in November 2017 and 17th when they turned to him again in December 2019. The turnaround since then has been staggering.
“To be fair,” he says, “West Ham really suited me because I think they were in a position where (…) the club was still finding its way. I think I can build clubs. I think it’s something I’m good at if I’m given the chance to do it. I try to recruit. I take lots of time over recruitment because if you sign the wrong centre-forward or the wrong centre-half, it doesn’t help you and you lose your job.
Moyes is applauded by the Everton fans in 2012
“You can never get it totally right, but even in the early days at Everton we brought in a lot of players from outside the Premier League (Lee Carsley from Coventry City, Tim Cahill from Millwall, Joleon Lescott from Wolverhampton Wanderers, Phil Jagielka from Sheffield United etc). We brought in boys who were hungry and good characters and we gave them a chance. I’m trying to do something similar at West Ham — trying to bring in hungry players with good characters who at least won’t embarrass the supporters who are watching us every week.
“And we’ve done better than that. We’ve actually moved on and we’ve got some really good players and a much-improving team.”
For years, West Ham’s recruitment seemed to be a bit of a mess. They would be one of those clubs thrashing around at the end of a transfer window, taking punts on players whose best years were behind them. But I look at some of the signings David has made — Tomas Soucek, Jarrod Bowen, Vladimir Coufal, Said Benrahma, Craig Dawson, Kurt Zouma, even Jesse Lingard on loan — and it’s young, hungry players or it’s hungry older players with something to prove. They now look like one of the fittest, hungriest teams in the Premier League.
“I think there’s a much better mentality around West Ham now,” he says. “And I’ve got to say it’s been driven on by the two Czech boys (Soucek and Coufal), who have been sensational for that. Honestly, we had to lock the gates to keep them out the place at night.
“That meant that even the boys who think they’re good pros had to step up again. They were even leading the recovery sessions, jogging maybe half a dozen laps and taking a ball with them. That was their mentality. And we’ve demanded that Declan (Rice) takes the standard up, trying to get the standard of training up every day. If you’re training with Harry Maguire and Harry Kane and the top players (with England), you have to see those levels and bring it back to our place and show us all what standards they need to reach.”
Just how good is Rice? “If I think of when Jordan Henderson left Sunderland to go to Liverpool, there were a lot of people who were saying… not that they were surprised, but they weren’t sure,” he says. “I think Declan is a similar age now to what Jordan was then. And I think Declan at the moment is in a really good position. Jordan Henderson has been a great player and captain for Liverpool, having to take over from Steven Gerrard, and he has done a brilliant job. I think Declan has got a lot of the same traits.
“And as a player, he’s quick, he’s good on the ball. There’s a lot of things he can still improve on. We want to improve his passing and his goalscoring. We’re trying to get all those elements picked up, but there’s a lot of players — good England players — who at 22, 23 aren’t even close to being at the level they want to be. I think Declan is (already) a good way down the line to becoming a really top player. I might be wrong in saying this, but he probably won’t be far off being one of the first picks for England now. Maybe Harry Kane would be the only one in front of him.”
It begs the obvious questions. Can West Ham keep him? Will they need to win trophies to keep hold of him? “Probably we do, yeah,” David says, “so we’ve got to keep driving it on. I have to keep driving and demanding that we keep moving on and being positive in our outlook of where we’re going to be. I need to keep adding good players, which is part of the club’s responsibility to keep with it.
“But the good thing is that we’ve got him for another three and a half years on his contract (until June 2024 with the option of an additional year), so we’re not under pressure from that. We would love him to stay, he’s so important to us, but like everything else we have to show that we can do it as well at West Ham.”
Can he maintain the progress of the last two seasons? “I think if we can keep on building, yes,” he says. “I keep using that word: building and building. If we try to go sort of fast-elevator to the top, we’ll fail. Well, we actually have gone in a fast elevator towards the top if you think where we were two years ago, but I’ve got to make sure we don’t fall away from it.
“I remember in my early days at Everton, we would have a good season, then a bad season, good season, bad season. It took me four, five to get that stable and then we started to become a side that was regularly trying to break that glass ceiling of that top five or six in England. West Ham is a little bit the same. We’ve got to be careful and not think, ‘This is it. We’ve gone straight up and that’s where we’re staying’. It’s going to take a lot of work even to stay where we are because the quality in the Premier League at the moment is through the roof. You can never turn up for a game thinking, ‘We’ve got a right good chance here. We should win this quite comfortably’.”
Has the job got harder over the years with so many top-class coaches now working in the Premier League? “Yes because there’s more elements to the game now,” he says. “You’ve done your work, your training, you’ve picked your team, but there’s so much more tactics to the game now. ‘How do you stop teams building? How do you build? How are they going to try to stop us? What are we going to do?’
Moyes admits joining Sunderland was a poor decision
“There’s so much detailed work done by the analysts these days. Some of the games are incredibly difficult. I think the speed of the play — the speed of the players — has gone up again. All that kind of thing has improved, so we’re needing fast players, quick players, players who have got diesel engines. And that’s coupled with the quality, so you need the quality of goalscorers, quality of crossers, quality of defenders which allows you to… not gamble, but play on the halfway line and feel safe. All of those elements make it much harder for the managers now because trying to pull it all together is a really, really big job.”
It’s to David’s credit that he has been one of the few managers who has successfully adapted to those changes. He was the youngest manager in the Premier League when he arrived at Everton two decades ago. He probably won’t thank me for pointing out that, at 58, he’s now the third-oldest behind Roy Hodgson and Ralf Rangnick.
I ask him if he can see himself managing at 74 like Roy. He’s absolutely certain that he can’t, which is probably why he was so desperate to seize this opportunity at West Ham. If he hadn’t, it might have been his last chance in the Premier League. “It could have been,” he says, “so I knew I had to come back. In my mind I had something I had to prove again — more for myself than for other people. Ultimately I had to come back and I had something to prove.”
He has proved it at West Ham. From the position when he took over just over two years ago, I cannot see how he or any manager could realistically have done better than he has done over that period. I remember thinking the same at Everton. But after more than two decades in management, he wants a trophy to show for that progress.
“I would love to be a serial winner,” he says. “But I think sometimes you have to be at a club with good enough players and be somewhere where you think we’ve got a chance. I got to the FA Cup final with Everton and we lost to Chelsea. The competition in English football is incredibly difficult. Even now, when you look at who wins in the FA Cup, now and again we’ll get a Wigan or a Leicester City, but in the main it’s the biggest clubs. I played my full team at Southampton (in the FA Cup fifth round) and we lost. We knocked Manchester United and Manchester City out of the Carabao Cup, but then we played Tottenham in the quarter-finals and lost 2-1. Somewhere along the line, you probably need a bit of good fortune.
“I would love to do that, but you’ve got to realise it’s a really difficult job to overcome a Man City or a Liverpool or a Chelsea or a Man United, Arsenal, Tottenham. It’s not easy in the quality of league we’ve got.”
Nor was it easy to qualify for the Europa League — ahead of Tottenham and Arsenal — and then to get through to the knockout stage and beat Sevilla over two legs. Next comes a quarter-final against Lyon and then, potentially, a semi-final against Barcelona or Eintracht Frankfurt. It’s an amazing journey West Ham and their supporters are on, as you saw in the scenes at the London Stadium last week.
“At the moment, the place is jumping, it really is,” says David. “The West Ham supporters, everywhere you go at the moment, they’re feeling that excitement. I actually feel the club is more joined-up than any time I can remember. You’ll remember it when you were a player where you would think, ‘Which West Ham is going to turn up? What are you going to get from this team?’ You just didn’t know. And I’m determined to try and rid the club of that. I want us to get away from that.
“I use this continuously where I talk about the ‘new’ West Ham. I want the West Ham support to be as ferocious as ever and I want the crowds in the East End of London to come and watch us, but we also need to build a new club here for the future and a new club here for moving forward, a club which can challenge at the top of the league, a club which has got a great stadium, a club which is going to try to bring in young players and encourage young players to get into the first team.
Coufal has been a good example to the West Ham squad
“And I hope we’ve got England internationals. We’ve got Declan Rice at the moment. With a bit of luck we might have had Jarrod Bowen if it hadn’t been for injury. Suddenly young Ben Johnson has been called into the England Under-21s. We’ve got two or three boys from the academy in the England Under-20s and the under-19s. Last year our under-23s were on the verge of getting relegated. This year they’re challenging Man City to win the league. So there’s a huge upturn. We have to make sure we keep the bar high.”
One thought comes to mind. The David Moyes of 2022 seems better equipped for a job like Manchester United than he was back in 2013. “Probably,” he says. “I feel my level with the players would be better now as well.
“It wasn’t to be. The biggest thing is that when you get the opportunity to take these jobs, you’ve got to be able to take it. And I wasn’t. The big job I got, it didn’t work and I didn’t do well enough in it, so it sort of knocked me back down and I had to try find another way of climbing the ladder and getting back up to the level where I can be competing against the best — the elite managers, the best teams in Europe — and trying to show what I can do.”
And it’s to his huge credit that he is doing that at West Ham. They now look like a hungry team — a David Moyes team. They look genuine, like their manager, and he looks happier than he’s looked in years.
|
