West Ham United need mammoth effort in final says Moyes

The Hammers ended the Premier League season in 14th place after losing 2-1 at Leicester, who were relegated to the Championship, at the weekend.

They headed out to Portugal for a three-day training camp on Monday, ahead of their clash with Fiorentina on June 7 and Moyes knows his side will need to be at their best as they chase their first major trophy in 43 years.

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“We’ve got a near fully-fit squad, they’re all in really good spirits,” he told whufc.com. 

“Round the club everybody is excited, but we now need to make sure we keep the excitement up, but get it ready and get the players at the right levels to go out and perform as well as we’ll need to do.

“We’re up against a really tough opponent and it will take a mammoth effort to see us win the trophy.”

West Ham could have climbed to 12th on the last day of the domestic season with success at the King Power Stadium, but fell behind in the first half to a Harvey Barnes goal.

Said Benrahma hit a post before Wout Faes headed Leicester’s second goal just past the hour mark, with a late reply from Pablo Fornals proving little consolation as West Ham suffered their 20th league defeat of the season and finished six points clear of the bottom three.

“There’s no big celebration because we’ve avoided relegation, far from it,” added Moyes.

“There were games in the run-in where we’ve come from two down against Arsenal, we’ve beaten Manchester United and went away to win at Fulham and Bournemouth in this period.

“We’ve had some really good results and some of them we’ve had to dig deep to get. In between that we’ve had Thursday night games as well and we’ve had to try to find a way of winning Premier League games in a period when we were under so much pressure.

“It’s terrific that we’ve got to this point, but it’s not something that we will be celebrating because we’ve finished 14th in the league.”

Fornals, having scored the winner in the semi-final second leg at AZ Alkmaar when coming off the bench, took his tally for the season to seven goals as he started a third successive Premier League match.

And the Spaniard earned praise from Moyes, who said: “He’s been a bit unlucky for long parts of the season but he’s playing well. 

“He played really well at Alkmaar, he played really well against Leeds United and I thought he played well today. 

“He’s certainly putting himself in the frame to get a start [in the final] because of how well he’s doing and he’s scoring goals, which is the thing we need.”