“My biggest learning is there’s a spirit and a fight and a resilience in this group that I really, really like. I’ve demanded from the first day of stepping in. We don’t have many training sessions, but we spoke about reacting positively to setbacks. We’ve spoken about reactions to losing the ball, pressing, energy, intensity. All of that was there in the second half, which wasn’t there in the first half. I don’t put that just down to the changes I made.
“It’s very difficult. We’ve had so many games in a short space of time. I was fearful of a lack of energy and not energy or lack of application, but I felt our decision-making was really poor in the first half. When to keep the ball, when we pressed, we were just too far off it. West Ham were by far the better team. We had a reaction at half-time. The reaction of the team in the second half tells me that we’ve got something really, really special here if I can utilise the squad in the correct way.
“[…] Individually, collectively, our first-half performance was nowhere near the level that it needed to be and should be. The individuals came off and then people will look at them. That wasn’t on them. It was a collective. There was a collective poor performance in the first half. Those players know with me, I make early changes. It doesn’t mean that all of a sudden they’re out of my thoughts at all. It was just a really lethargic performance in the first half, but the second half was everything I wanted to see.”
-Liam Rosenior; source: Football.London