Moyes says appointing him manager for the third time can save West Ham

If at first you don't succeed...

West Ham manager David Moyes has claimed the club’s best hope for Premier League survival is to fire him before reappointing him for a third time, following Tuesday’s 2-0 defeat to Tottenham Hotspur.

Picking from his tombola of post-defeat excuses, the Scot fumed over VAR’s failure to rule out Spurs’ opener due to a Davinson Sanchez handball in the build-up, before insisting that West Ham should reappoint him for a third time as manager if they want to save their season.

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“I’m a winner. I’ve won everywhere I’ve been – usually I get a couple in the first few games anyway, ” the former-former-and-now-current West Ham manager stated. “If I were the owners, I’d hire me again. I could come in, turn things around, put smiles back on faces and get West Ham to safety.”

However, in a blow to the beleaguered manager’s standing among supporters, Moyes’ claim to be a “winner” saw Twitter add a fact-check label to any tweets quoting the 57-year-old manager such has been his lack of success in recent years, which included a summary of his performance in recent jobs.

“Get the facts about David Moyes and winning” read the note, which then linked to summaries of his time at West Ham, Sunderland and Real Sociedad.

In his second stint at the London club the side has won just three games in 14 since Manuel Pellegrini’s departure in December. That follows his previous spell, from November 2017 to May 2018, where the club recorded nine wins in 31 games as they avoided relegation following Slaven Bilic’s sacking.

Prior to that, his 43 games as Sunderland boss returned just eight wins as the club sank into the Championship, and League One a season later, though he did manage to collect double-digit wins in Spain as manager of Basque side Real Socieded, with 12 victories in 42 games.

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And in further developments around the Hammers, sources within the prefab that Davids Gold and Sullivan run the club from suggest the East End side could continue revisiting old managers in a bid to save their top-flight status, with the return of Sam Allardyce being mooted for their next game against Chelsea next Wednesday – followed by Avram Grant, Gianfranco Zola, Alan Pardew, Glenn Roeder, Harry Redknapp and even Alan Curbishley – he’s always interested in a new job – getting another crack at the Hammers hot-seat.

A source close to the owners said that “the accusation is always that we don’t have a plan and are only interested in milking the club – well we’ve got our next seven or eight managers lined up now. All we have to do is get sacking them.”

And, with Kevin Nolan already at the club as coach, Allardyce is seen as a natural fit to rescue the struggling side, though his reported plans to bring Kevin Davies, Ivan Campo and Jussi Jaaskelainen in at short notice to bolster survival effort have been received coolly by fans.

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