How David Moyes has taken West Ham from Premier League’s rocky waters to high seas

Manager’s return almost a year ago was met with muted excitement - but the tide has turned emphatically

(POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

David Moyes might eschew football’s glamour and excess, but after wearing so many smears, these are giddy champagne moments to savour. It is not just West Ham’s unthinkably high position, their rigid defence or even the gauntlet of fixtures they’ve overcome, but rather how he has stamped out the airs and graces and overhauled an identity.

It has been the longest of years since Moyes’s grizzled return to the London Stadium, but the mechanisms of change, for a club seemingly on the permanent brink of anarchy have been remarkable. It’s easy to forget that, when parachuted in to rebuild the wreckage last Christmas, Moyes’s appointment was greeted with all the excitement of a lurking undertaker. The way he again dug West Ham out of their hole, though - with relegation and financial catastrophe clawing - was a firm rebuttal to those who scorned him as a backward step. And this barely imaginable run of form that’s followed - currently fifth in the table with 17 points - should only exacerbate frustrations around why the misdirection under Manuel Pellegrini ever came to pass at all.

Perhaps, the legacy of Moyes’s enduring achievements will always be overshadowed by his short-shrift spell at Manchester United, when the magnitude seemed to shake his principles and, ultimately, he never could conjure the frills and fantasy needed to inspire. West Ham’s board, though, have been guilty all too often of chasing fool’s gold, and yet while Moyes might be considered a wearied, old-school tactician, he was never the caricature some painted during his lowest ebbs at United and Real Sociedad. He was familiar with West Ham’s internal workings, knew where the problems were born, and declared that he would leave the club with “no choice” but to extend his contract - something that less than 12 months later feels almost a certainty.

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In doing so, Moyes has built a foundation, not in style but substance, where bad attitudes aren’t suffered and wills are not for bending. And while West Ham have had a tendency to veer violently into bad decisions in the past, Moyes has remained a constant force, gaining control over a scattergun transfer policy and instilling a set of ideals that have muted the surrounding chaos. The circus of discontent that spilt into protests last February and the furore over Grady Diangana’s sale earlier in the summer now feel far removed from this present vision, and that is not a feat that should be understated. Some might still accuse Moyes of being ‘boring’, but when uproar has been such a common feature at the club, his presence has not been dull but in fact peaceful. 

David Moyes has taken West Ham from the brink of chaos to giddy heights (POOL/AFP via Getty Images)

The traits Moyes demands - namely a strong defensive output, a furious intolerance for slackness and red-misted desire to see every duel as a fistfight - are now immediately visible in his players. Declan Rice is the obvious beacon and had long showed that ferocity, but there is no doubting how Moyes has fanned the England international’s glow as a leader. Angelo Ogbonna and Fabian Balbuena have been welded into a reliable axis, even displacing the long-favoured Issa Diop. Michail Antonio has flourished on the effective if unimaginative long balls into the channels and transformed into an out-and-out striker. Tomas Soucek, a crazed battering ram of a box-to-box midfielder, has been utterly brilliant, all scything limbs and soaring headers, and Pablo Fornals seems to have found his feet after a spell of treading water. In fact, in the space of a disjointed season, Moyes has arguably raised the individual level of almost every player - even if coaxing Sebastien Haller to form remains largely a mystery.

For what seemed like so many years, the cliche that surrounded West Ham was one of their perceived quality always outweighing the material results; perennial underachievers, for whom dysfunction triumphed over direction. Now, the opposite is true. West Ham are making a mockery of predictions, riding their luck when needed and standing firm when it switches sides. Whether they can sustain this level throughout a whole season is another altogether unlikely matter, even if the squad is now of far greater depth and balance than the one Moyes inherited. That they are even in this position at all is a credit to him. These past few years have been tumultuous, surfing one choppy tide after another but now the London Stadium is basking in a rare moment of tranquillity, even if Moyes is far too hardened to think it could endure for too long. He has captained a creaking ship and taken them from damned to defying, and without him stepping in last December, it’s hard to imagine West Ham being anywhere other than trying to avoid rock bottom. 

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