West Ham United manager David Moyes has sent his players a warning ahead of their second Europa Conference League group stage match away at Danish side Silkeborg.
The Hammers came from behind to beat FCSB at the London Stadium last week, beating the Romanian outfit 3-1 with second half goals from Jarrod Bowen, Emerson Palmieri and Michail Antonio, which proved to be one of the more dominant results in the opening round of fixtures in the competition last Thursday despite scoring three goals in the final 21 minutes.
When asked if last week's match shows that it's possible to get a banana skin in the Europa Conference League, Moyes responded: "Undoubtedly. If you look through all the results from the competition last week, I think there was only Basel who beat a team 3-1. We won 3-1, there wasn’t another game that was one than more than 1-0, 0-0, 2-1, 1-1. The games were incredibly tight.
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"I said it last year when I went to Europe. It’s okay when you look back and say, ‘yes, you’ve done that quite simply,’ but all of the games for us had a real level of difficulty. We took some risks last year, and strangely enough, we will have to continue probably taking some risks at different times of the competition to see if we can do it because of the level of the Premier League and what is required at the weekend. We learned a lot from last year and learned that if you’re not correct, you will easily get turned over by the other teams."
The Scotsman's side will also have to adapt to playing on an artificial pitch on Thursday evening in Denmark, which could be an additional factor for the West Ham boss to consider. Indeed, he says that Silkeborg's home pitch will be different for his players and something they will have to get used to quickly.
"There are a lot of different ways of looking at it," he said. "I, as a player, played on a plastic pitch for about three years, so I have got a good idea of how you can play, and there are different ways and different philosophies and different ways of how it should be done.
"I have to say, in modern football nowadays, I don’t see the top-level players really wanting to play on astroturf pitches. I totally respect it because I think for young players, for development and younger age group pitches, with the weather conditions, I am from Scotland, so I know that very well, pitches are so important. But I actually think when you get to top-level football, we are used to natural, and this will be different for us, and we have to take that into consideration."
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