Speaking to the media after the West Ham United defeat, Tim Ream said he hopes that the sorts of decisions that went against Fulham on Sunday, will work in his side’s favour at some point this season.
Well Tim, you were leading in that match, how do you think ultimately it’s gotten away from Fulham?
A couple of decisions, we made a few mistakes, and ultimately it cost us the match. It’s something that we’ll obviously have to look at this week and rectify going into next weekend.
Let’s talk about the penalty incident. Andreas Pereira was talked to by the referee, what do you think was going through his mind when he then made the challenge on Craig Dawson?
I know he was warned a few times. We’ve had that discussion in the pre-season about how that’s going to be dealt with. Obviously he, in the eyes of the referee, made that choice, made that decision, and that’s obviously gone against us today. We’ll see if that’s going to be called consistently this year. Hopefully so, and we’ll see the benefit of that.
And in the second half, West Ham took the lead through Gianluca Scamacca. He didn’t celebrate his goal initially. I know Bernd Leno was saying it was handball – were you expecting it to be ruled out?
I think the majority of us were, yeah. Standing right behind it, potentially two separate incidents with one player. I think Bernd was actually saying that to the referee, that he wasn’t celebrating because he felt he was offside, or it was a potential handball. He kind of knew. But, again, that’s one of those that goes against you in swings and roundabouts, and hopefully we see a benefit of that later on.
Andreas Pereira did hand Fulham the lead in just the fifth minute. There were some positive passages of play for sure today – what will be the positives that you take from this match?
We just need to be more consistent in the way we move the ball. We did it very well for stretches of the match. Unfortunately not enough to create as many problems as we would have liked. Obviously Andreas with a fantastic goal to start the game, and we started exactly the way we wanted to. For whatever reason, we didn’t sustain that and we got a little bit lax in the way we moved the ball. Dan James hitting the crossbar as well – it could have been a very different game. Overall, not consistent enough moving the ball around and creating pockets and opportunities for ourselves.
I know it’s back-to-back losses now in the Premier League, but given your positive start back in the Premier League, do you think the confidence is there that you can get back on track?
Yeah of course. We’re not a down, negative bunch. We’ve done a lot of good things, and it’s times like these where we’ve got to lean on that. We know how much hard work we need to continue to put in. The games don’t get any easier, every single match is difficult and we have to wrap our heads around that and come out next weekend with the same attitude and same fight.
