West Ham manager Slaven Bilic: I understand why there has been speculation over my future

Looking up: Slaven Bilic
West Ham United via Getty Images
Slaven Bilic25 November 2016

The defeat at Tottenham was hard to take. In five years’ time, the memory will still be painful for me. We knew how much this game meant to the fans, as it did for us at the club, and we came so close but in the end we lost.

Had we held out and won we would have pulled away from the bottom of the Premier League but, as it is, we are just one place above the bottom three with a tough schedule ahead.

Following the 3-2 defeat at White Hart Lane, there has been speculation about my future. I understand that will happen.

I am not a newcomer to this game and neither am I stupid. I know you are judged on the table and the number of points you have.

STAT

West Ham have won just three points away from home in the Premier League this season

There is nothing I can do about that except work hard and look for us to win games. It is not as if we have dropped our performance level. We were a confident team at Spurs.

All I am thinking about is how to improve things, to keep our concentration up until the last second and to eliminate those silly mistakes.

In the corresponding match last season we went to White Hart Lane in a good run of form and lost 4-1. Some people have suggested that last weekend’s 3-2 defeat was even worse.

I think that what they mean is that this one hurts more and it is taking longer to get over it.

Would we rather get hammered? No. This defeat is very painful because we should have won but we can - and we will - take many positives from it. When you are beaten 4-1 there can’t be too many plus points.

This one really hurts - and for longer - but when we analyse the display, then for almost all of the game we did well, both individually and as a team. The mistakes cost us dearly but I can take positives from 80 per cent of that game.

For the next couple of days, the players were low and you could see it hurt them but now we are approaching a new game - admittedly another tough one at Manchester United - and we know if we do the majority of things as well as we did at Spurs, then we have a good chance.

We now face two matches at Old Trafford within the space of four days. I certainly won’t look at Sunday’s League match, though, with one eye on the EFL Cup quarter-final the following Wednesday. We will go there with our strongest team this weekend and see what happens.

As for United, they haven’t yet hit their best form but they were looking better against Arsenal last weekend and certainly looked the part last night in their Europa League clash with Feyenoord.

They played well against Leicester, Fenerbahce and even against Burnley, they were so unlucky not to win.

Of course, I have great respect for them and it is one of the toughest fixtures of the season but now even more, we have to concentrate on ourselves.

Our captain, Mark Noble, is available again after suspension and we missed his character against Spurs, especially towards the end when Tottenham were taking risks and bombing forward. You always need leaders.

It is worrying that, as at Spurs, we’ve had real trouble killing games off after being in front. We must do better.

I also came in for criticism for the substitutions at Spurs and, straight after the match and in view of what happened, I knew it would have been better had I not changed certain things.

For me, though, it was an absolutely logical thing to do at the time. I was happy with the first two substitutions, with Andre Ayew, who is still coming back to full fitness, and Diafra Sakho, who was playing his first game of the season, coming off after an hour.

For many, though, it was the last one - Havard Nordtveit for Dimitri Payet - which ultimately changed the game.

Before the game I was asked if the team I had picked was too attacking but it wasn’t like that. An important part of defending is how good you are when you have the ball.

After we scored our second I didn’t expect us to be holding on for half an hour. We wanted to kill the game off and had three opportunities to do that.

But they were putting us under more and more pressure and with just over five minutes left I wasn’t thinking any more about scoring another goal but rather that we just needed to hold on.

So that is why I made the substitution, I felt we needed an extra body in a midfield holding position with Pedro Obiang but it didn’t work out well.

As I said, if someone reminds me about this game in five years, the hurt will still be there - it’s one of those.

Having said that, I’d recovered by the following day. As a manager, you have to do that. You have to set an example, you dust yourself down, clap your hands and say: “Okay, let’s go again!”

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