**Twenty-four hours after the full time whistle, West Ham’s 2-0 defeat to Aston Villa is still playing on my mind.**
After a really positive couple of months where the mentality of the team really seemed to shift, we looked like early season West Ham on Sunday at its really worried me.
Let’s just hope it’s a blip, a bump in the road and we still have fight in us. With Tottenham’s heavy defeat against Forest, we still have every chance of staying up, surely us staying up and relegating Spurs in the process should be enough to motivate the team.
However, for the first time in a long time it didn’t seem like that at Villa Park yesterday.
We were facing an out of form team with our two biggest relegation rivals playing eachother at the same time. Get a result and we were pretty much guaranteed to get out of the relegation zone.
But we didn’t play like that at all, we had no confidence, we didn’t look like we wanted it all, compared to how much they did last week against Manchester City anyway.
The injury to Jean-Clair Todibo in the warm up definitely didn’t help. The boys would have been preparing all week to play in a back three, then fifteen minutes before kickoff it was changed. That would have shook up the game plan a bit, but I’m not sure that was much of the problem, it was almost as if the players didn’t believe which was suprising.
We’ve got two weeks off now over the international break to make sure we get that desire back in the side. With an FA Cup quarter final against Leeds and a must-win match at home against bottom of the table Wolves coming up, we really need a mentality boost.
It simply wasn’t good enough on Sunday, if we want to stay in this League, the players have to give everything in every single game.