Momentum key for Hammers’ Reid

West Ham captain Winston Reid hopes the momentum built by three consecutive Premier League wins has not been eroded by another three losses on the spin.

After a rocky start to the season, Slaven Bilic’s side beat Burnley, Hull and Swansea, and also drew 2-2 with Liverpool, as they went four league games unbeaten in December.

But a narrow loss to Leicester and successive home defeats to Manchester sides following the turn of the year have once again raised questions over the wisdom of the move to the London Stadium.

The club posted the official dimensions of the pitch, the same width as Upton Park but 4.5 metres longer, to quieten talk of the new ground being too different to their old home.

But Reid insists it is the player performances that make the difference, and hopes they can re-find the momentum lost in early 2017 by their 5-0 FA Cup drubbing by City.

Photo by Kieran Galvin/NurPhoto via Getty Images

“We’ve got eight days until the next game and we’ve been picking up points in the league,” he said.

“We won three games on the trot and then were a bit unlucky against Leicester and then had that decision against Man United. Those last two games were tough.

“When you’ve momentum, you’ve got to keep it going. We had a full house and were playing against a big team, but when you make mistakes, at the end of the day you get punished, especially against these.

“That’s the underlying fact – we made too many individual mistakes which cost us football matches. We weren’t making them recently like we were at the start of the season, and that makes it difficult for a team to recover.

“One-hundred per cent we need to bounce back like we did after the Arsenal game.

“We can be honest and say the season hasn’t panned out like we wanted it to so far, but we still have half-a-season to go and our focus is on getting up the league – we need to do that.”