West Ham midfielder Declan Rice has aimed what appears to be a dig at manager David Moyes’ tactics in the 2-0 defeat to Tottenham.
The Hammers are not having their best season, with Moyes perhaps losing his dressing room a little by being too negative in his approach to the game away to Spurs.
Speaking after the game, Rice suggested that the team’s attacking players were left too isolated due to Moyes setting up with five at the back.
Tottenham play a similar system, so it perhaps wasn’t the worst idea to try to match it, but it clearly didn’t have the desired effect and Rice didn’t seem too happy about it.
“When you play with five at the back and the three, like we set up today, maybe our strikers felt a bit isolated when we got the ball up to them — they didn’t really have enough around them, not enough support,” Rice said, as quoted by the Daily Mirror.
Rice will surely have his eye on a big move in the summer as he looks too good to carry on at a club like West Ham for much longer.
As recently revealed in Ben Jacobs’ exclusive CaughtOffside column, Rice is a top target for Arsenal and other big names can’t be ruled out either.
It’s not just this game though, expecting a striker to defend from a corner, run the entire length of the pitch whilst beating 3 of their defenders to score a goal, isn’t going to happen. It’s about time the idiot that is David Moyes understood that not every player is like Wayne Rooney. With Moyes’s attitude to young players in general, I’m surprised he discovered him.