James Ward-Prowse slammed an “embarrassing” West Ham display after they were hammered by Crystal Palace on a desperate afternoon that adds to the uncertainty over David Moyes’s future.
The Hammers were thrashed 5-2 at Selhurst Park on Sunday, with the game as good as over after half-an-hour as Oliver Glasner’s side romped into a scarcely believable 4-0 lead.
Victory would have seen West Ham climb to sixth but instead they remain eighth, having played two more games than most of their rivals for the European places, and with hopes of a fourth straight continental campaign hanging by a thread.
Moyes is out of contract at the end of the season and all parties have repeatedly insisted that no decision on his future will be made until the end of the campaign. However, the manner of Sunday’s defeat casts fresh doubt over whether the Scot will be kept on even if he decides he does want to sign a new deal.
“[It was] nowhere near good enough,” Ward-Prowse said. “It was embarrassing on our part. We had a fantastic night in the week. We didn’t get through but we showed what I believe a West Ham team should look like, we were front-footed, aggressive.
“You can talk about the way you play with the ball but out of possession we didn’t show anywhere near enough aggression or togetherness and it cost us.”
West Ham’s form has dipped badly since the turn of the year, but they produced a superb display against unbeaten Bayer Leverkusen in the second-leg of their Europa League quarter-final on Thursday night, before ultimately falling to a 3-1 aggregate defeat.
The effects of that effort almost seemed likely to to be felt at Selhurst Park, with Moyes making only three changes to his lineup, but Ward-Prowse insisted the tight turnaround was not to blame for the Irons’s sorry show.
“There are a few reasons I think it could be but I don’t think the excuse of Thursday night is anything to throw into the mix,” the midfielder told Premier League Productions. “If we want to be a top team and be real contenders for European places, you can’t perform like we did against one of the best teams in the world at the moment in Bayer Leverkusen and then come here and get beaten the way we did.
“We have to consider what sort of team and what sort of players we want to be, whether we want to be European contenders or not.”
