For more than his admirers would have desired, Moyes bore the aggressively bewildered appearance of a man besieged by adversity as his standing in the game slipped in the mind after his short-lived reign as Manchester United boss. Those days are all gone.
He’s building again. Brick by brick, just like he used to perform at Everton at the decade and more that he spent between 2002 and 2013. He’s been given a chance to work the way he operates best and he has captured it. Building this up and building it up.
It was only in the past couple of weeks of the effort that West Ham were forced to give up on their hopes of qualifying for the Champions League. It was a startling transformation in the season before when Moyes, 58, had saved the Hammers out of relegation as the club had been caught in the center of acrimony between some of its fans and the owners.
When the supporters came back to the last day of the year, there was far less to be angry about. Moyes has seen to that. Little wonder He’s said to be going to sign a new 3-year deal at West Ham.’ I actually see the opportunity to make a fantastic club good again,’ Moyes states. ‘There’s so much more that can be achieved, a lot more that can be improved upon. That’s the bit that excites me more than anything else.
‘I have mellowed a little like the majority of us do as we get older but I like to say I have become much more experienced. I have had a excellent career but there is a part of me believing’is the very best to come, is your best just across the corner?’ Along with the ancient stuff was my apprenticeship and that is me taking the job properly. I am hoping that is the way it belongs.
‘When I return to where I had been in my first project at Preston North End, I think to myself that that was likely the best version of me because you do not take any baggage. You aren’t considering what the supporters are thinking, you aren’t considering what the media are thinking. You manage in all your glory.
There is media and there is bags but we just have to keep building.’
He says he can hear the shame in people’s questions occasionally when they talk about his collapse and ask him how it felt to be brought so low. Sympathy irritates him. He does not recognise the image of that man, he states.
When he looks back over a season that has seen him reestablish his standing among the best managers in British football. When he understands he has lifted West Ham from the doldrums of the Premier League into next season’s Europa League, finishing sixth, above Arsenal and Spurs.
‘My stock had fallen,’ Moyes says’but I never actually felt as low as people believed I must be feeling. I get reminded of it by journalists asking questions like’have you redeemed yourself?’ And’you have made yourself better, have not you?’ I never actually felt that low personally but it seems like in the external world, there was that impression of David Moyes.
‘I was a bit surprised by that but I could understand it. In a way, it’s pushed me to attempt to challenge it. I’d really like to be challenging the elite managers again. I was doing this in my best time at Everton. At Manchester United, we got into the quarter-finals of the Champions League and stuff like that. Folks forget. There are a lot of good things and sometimes they are misstrewn.’
There were a lot of good things. Enough good things for Sir Alex Ferguson to urge Moyes as his successor at Old Trafford and for the recommendation to be accepted. Moyes lasted 10 months prior to Ed Woodward’s nerve failed him, a conclusion which culminated in a cycle of shallow, impressionable appointments from which United are only now emerging beneath Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
Moyes’ time at Real Sociedad soured after a year, he was swallowed up in the black hole in Sunderland which has devoured so many excellent managers and then, after he had started well at West Ham in his very first stay in the club, the board decided they wanted to turn into a more exotic supervisor and replaced him with Manuel Pellegrini, that was a tragedy.
To the charge of owners David Sullivan and David Gold and chief executive Karren Brady, they were all big enough and intelligent enough to admit their error. Back in December 2019, together with the club visiting a point above the relegation zone, they went back to Moyes and asked him when he would return to finish what he had started and the manager and the club haven’t looked back.
You manage Everton for 11 and a half years, I do not think you stay in work that long in the event that you do a bad job. I certainly don’t believe you get offered the Manchester United job if you aren’t considered at a certain level.
‘But if the job in United came, it didn’t work and that I did not do well enough ten months and that I accept that but I really do think that people who know football would also accept there were other reasons why it didn’t work and it’s still tough.
‘You begin to find out a bit about yourself. I have become a better supervisor. I’m not quite as emotional as I had been. I’m calmer, even though it may not seem that way. I’m probably better at delegating now than I was when I was younger. I also believe I have kept a real fighting spirit. I adore the game totally. I enjoy watching football. I love going into the games. I enjoy being involved with the players.
‘All those things supposed that when I came back, I had a club which I could assemble. If you look at my history, that is where I have been best. This was my first full season at West Ham and now we have qualified for Europe. The majority of my years in Everton, we had been competing for European football. We were constantly round there.
‘If you add the first spell at West Ham into it, I have come back twice and saved them from relegation. So sometimes I don’t know if you have the recognition for particular jobs as they are not in the spotlight and you don’t get silverware in the end of this.
‘I’d like to acquire more silverware in the future and my very best chance of winning silverware is constructing West Ham up and giving them an opportunity and that is what we did in Everton. We had got to an FA Cup final, we’d got to the Champions League after and I believe with what is going on unless you’ve got billions of pounds, so I do not know if there is a better way of doing this than building up your club.’
Gary Neville lamented recently the lack of fans at matches for the vast majority of the season just passed has robbed Moyes and West Ham fans of the opportunity to bond within the startling improvement in their side after a beginning for his second spell in charge which was put against the background of a fractious, rebellious atmosphere in the London Stadium.
It may be that in the first phases of this season, when recovery was fragile, the lack of fans who’d grown so not happy with the board gave West Ham’s players more freedom to perform with no fear in an atmosphere shorn of recrimination and discontent. The transformation in the team which Moyes has wrought means the arena should have a very distinct feel .
‘No supporters like to be close to the bottom of the league,’ Moyes says. ‘If you’re up near the top and you’re competing and you’re introducing a great deal of new young players to the squad who you think are committed and determined and each of the words you’d want as a football supporter, I believe we have got that in abundance right now.
‘We have attempted to make the team new and better. We have not changed everything. We’ve not managed to solve all the issues but we’re doing our best to move things on the best we can. Thankfully, now we’ve a club which is all dressed, all start to go in the right direction, everyone singing from the exact same hymn book and that is actually helping us.
‘We have a little recruitment department which needs to be addressed because that isn’t the situation at any other club. We must put this in place. We need to get a professional believer about how we go about our organization. We need the supporters behind us and I want to try and help build a bridge so that we become a more all-in-one football club.’
Moyes would be without long-standing amount two Alan Irvine next season after his helper announced last week he was stepping away from the job for personal reasons but to protect the progress the team has made this year, Moyes is desperate to keep hold of the key players that have effected the improvement.
That list is led by Declan Rice, the central midfielder that has been an inspiration for his side and is set to play an integral role for England in the European Championships this summer.
Rice has been connected with a host of top clubs, most especially Chelsea, but the fact that West Ham are now part of England’s top six and going in the right direction again might mean it’s going to be easier for Moyes and the team to fend off the advances of other suitors.
‘I don’t think it’ll be difficult to keep hold of him’ Moyes says’since he is under contract. So we don’t have a concern about that. I feel that Declan will stay because he’s a part of something that he is growing in. He is one of the newest group of players, him and Tomas Soucek and Vladimir Coufal.
‘Declan is at a position where people will be looking at him. He is a terrific boy. He conducts himself very nicely. I need him to remain as long as he wishes to stay. I enjoy him. Like all gamers, I’m not selling any of them when I have my way.
‘During my trip as a supervisor, I needed to sell Wayne Rooney at one stage and you have individuals that are super talented and it could happen but if it did, it would just be for outstanding money. We would not want it to happen because we value Declan overly much. I enjoy working with him and I believe his development here will be really significant.
‘I think he’ll play a big part for England in the Euros. His energy, his youthfulness, his ability to be resilient and keep playing, his ability to recoup the ball, they’ll allow England to possess a more positive emphasis in different areas.
‘England are full of incredibly talented attacking players and, to allow them to go and do exactly what they wish to perform, you will need somebody who will make certain you are secure defensively. And the other part of that is that when you don’t have the ball, you need to be able to regain it and get it to those people. Declan covers those foundations.’
West Ham’s strong final-day success over Southampton confirmed that they had attained their greatest points total in a Premier League season, another ringing endorsement for the task Moyes is performing.
‘We haven’t done it correctly all the time,’ he says,’but we are trying really tough to keep moving forward and not slip back into where we were a few short years ago.’ Brick by brick, and the build goes on.
