West Ham pair David Moyes and Declan Rice face doomed night in the Europa Conference League final
The contrast between captain and manager was clear: Declan Rice spoke about the legacy ahead of his last game at West Ham; David Moyes, who this week insisted he wanted to stay with the Hammers, briefly ignored the prospect of becoming a legend.
“I don’t think I’m any different from everyone else in this room,” Moyes said in his press conference at the Eden Arena here in Prague, where his side take on Fiorentina tonight in the club’s first major European final in 47 years.
“I’m really fortunate, privileged and grateful to have been given the opportunity to become a football manager and have the opportunity to go so far in my career and be on a stage like this.”
“I never really consider myself a legend or anything like that. I would just like to be known as a football manager.”
Happy Hammers: Michail Antonio and Nayef Aguerd in training
/As hesitant as he is, there is something deeply personal about this final for Moyes as the 60-year-old weathered the season’s criticism and stands on the precipice of the first major title of his long career. He admitted it felt “surreal” to finally be the man in the box seat after years of watching contemporaries and rivals spend years working on some of sport’s biggest matches for UEFA.
For 24-year-old Rice, just about to spread his wings, there is less urgency but no less desperation; the opportunity to say a fitting farewell to the club that believed in him when others didn’t, to the club he defined.
The captain in particular was spared media duties yesterday, presumably fearing the event would be dominated by talks about his future, but made a sort of public appeal on the club’s channels.
“There’s an opportunity to create a legacy where every single player, manager and everyone involved will be remembered forever,” said the midfielder. “It would be my biggest success I’ve had in football so far, 100 percent.”
West Ham United fans gather in Prague for the 2023 UEFA Europa Conference League final
There is a clear symmetry to the place in the annals of West Ham history that awaits Messrs Moyes and Rice. The former has the potential to become only the third Hammers manager to win a trophy, after John Lyall and Ron Greenwood, while the latter joins them with Bobby Moore and Billy Bonds becoming just the third captain to win one.
But what about the supporting cast? It doesn’t seem entirely accurate to mention players like Thilo Kehrer and Said Benrahma in the same paper, let alone in the same sentence as Bonds and Moore, but in the context of a club’s 43-year wait for silver medals, there’s room in a choose a club for them too.
Opportunities like this don’t come often for teams like West Ham and we don’t want that to belittle one of the country’s greatest and proudest clubs. However, English football has changed and gone are the days when a full field started each season with the goal of cup success. Manchester City’s dominance is about to reach near-unprecedented levels and Pep Guardiola’s side are on average good for two of the three domestic titles on offer each year. In the last ten seasons, only one team outside of the Premier League’s so-called ‘Big Six’ has won a major trophy, either domestically or internationally. One of the people inside actually didn’t do this.
There is a chance to create a legacy that everyone involved will remember forever
As the pool of conquerors shrinks, the spoils of victory are less and less evenly distributed and despite West Ham’s financial advantage over their Conference League opponents, this is not a squad made up of superstars or serial winners .
There are notable exceptions: Lucas Paqueta has cost £50m and his presence at West Ham increasingly appears to be a game of light; Kurt Zouma and Emerson enjoyed trophy-winning outskirts at Chelsea; Alphonse Areola has walls covered in medals from Paris Saint-Germain and Real Madrid.
But there are also players like Aaron Cresswell and Angelo Ogbonna, club faithful at the end of their careers, for whom the chance will certainly not come again; Czech couple Tomas Soucek and Vladimir Coufal, for whom the stars couldn’t be more perfectly aligned; a native boy in Flynn Downes and adopted Cockney Pablo Fornals who would enjoy nothing quite like this level of esteem elsewhere; Wingers such as Jarrod Bowen and Benrahma, who have made their mark in the Championship; Joining Michail Antonio is a centre-forward that the club have tried to improve but somehow keep coming back to and his understudy Danny Ings, who was cruelly left out of Liverpool’s squad for the Champions League final four years ago.
In short, they’re a hodgepodge of sorts, a collection of unlikely guys brought together little by little and as much by circumstance as by a big, overarching vision.
But like few West Ham teams before them, they stand on the brink of immortality.
https://www.standard.co.uk/sport/football/west-ham-europa-conference-league-final-moyes-rice-b1086182.html West Ham pair David Moyes and Declan Rice face doomed night in the Europa Conference League final
