DAVID MOYES is back fighting it out at the top again.
This is the Moyes who over-achieved for 11 years at Everton — a three-time Manager of the Year, an astute recruiter of players, a builder of football clubs.
Now, after four successive jobs in which he was never afforded more than a year, Moyes is showing how, if you give him the time, he will produce the results.
West Ham, widely tipped as relegation candidates at the start of the season, are the top club in London, in fifth place with six straight wins and facing Liverpool tomorrow just two points behind the champions.
While Moyes insists the Hammers were overambitious in sanctioning a £175million splurge under Manuel Pellegrini, only to end up in relegation danger, he admits he cannot help but dream the ‘unrealistic’ dream of Champions League qualification.
When he returned to West Ham last season, the club was in need of change.
There were frustrated fans, too many under- performing expensive players and forward Michail Antonio having just demolished a wall in his sports car while dressed as a snowman.
A year on, Moyes has brought order and unity — modest new recruits are thriving, along with established players like Antonio.
Moyes said: “I want to be incredibly ambitious. I want to be competing in European football.
“I want to be competing against elite managers and elite clubs, nearly all the jobs I’ve been in have involved that. The job now is to get West Ham competing against elite clubs regularly.
FREE BETS: GET OVER £2,000 IN SIGN UP OFFERS HERE
“It is a really big opportunity for somebody to get hold of the club and get it going right.”
So is Champions League qualification this season too ambitious?
Moyes said: “Yes, it’s too ambitious, yes. But I am ambitious. And because of that, I’m not going to stop dreaming about it or trying to do it.
“If this interview was taking place a year ago, you’d be saying ‘David, how are you going to avoid relegation?’.
“I know it’s a strange season but for us to play so well after lockdown, stay in the Premier League and now ‘Can you be in the top four?’. Last year, you’d have said there’s no way.
“So I think you have to say we are going to try.
“I don’t want to aim low but during lockdown, the Archbishop of York was talking about the Government and said ‘they need to promise less and deliver more’.
“We have to be careful we don’t promise things we can’t deliver. I don’t want to do that to West Ham fans. But I want to give them consistency, something sustainable.
“If this Liverpool game was taking place in front of supporters, you wouldn’t get a ticket anywhere.
“There are so many West Ham supporters and with the team doing this well, in the days when you queued at the turnstiles, they’d have queued for miles.
“I hope when that time comes it’s really, really difficult to get a ticket.”
MORE TO FOLLOW…