Silva: Everton showed our quality, possibly our best performance

Everton finally put it together today and won with a dominant performance over West Ham United at Goodison Park. The Blues scored twice and should have had more to relieve some of the pressure on manager Marco Silva with majority shareowner Farhad Moshiri and club chairman Bill Kenwright in attendance.

Speaking after the game, Silva said he was relaxed in the week leading up to today despite his seat getting decidedly warm -

“I was calm today, was calm during the week, because I know what I’m doing. I have full confidence in our staff and in our players with what we are doing.

“In football sometimes you cannot achieve the result, but inside we know what we’re doing and the confidence was there. Of course it’s better when you win games in a row.

“My job is to plan the game well, to prepare the players well, and afterwards I’m pleased to see how they perform and how they keep believing how we’re doing. I’m here to get results and to develop the players like we did last season and will do this season too.”

When asked what showed the most this afternoon, Silva was in no doubt.

“The quality. We showed the quality we have and that was the main thing for me. For us as a team the way we are working the quality is important and allowing the players to express themselves on the pitch.

“The pace we played at, the intensity we played with, we showed it in the moments we lost the ball, and of course our organization and some really good individual performances in our team.

“As a collective we did really well, a lot of mobility in our offensive organization. The three front players did very well with Alex Iwobi behind them.”

For the fans, this was clearly the Blues best performance of the season, nine games in, and the manager agreed.

“Possibly it was our best performance. It’s good to see how we reacted and went out and enjoyed our football, even if we weren’t in our best moments in the past few results when we didn’t achieve what we deserved.

“But we have full confidence in them and the work we’re doing in Finch Farm, and this was a must-win game for us.”

Gylfi Sigurdsson dropped to the bench today, but then came on late to seal the game with West Ham pressing for the equalizer and Goodison getting nervy.

“At that moment we really deserved more, so many chances we had, one off the bar, one off the post. But it was really important we created so many chances.

“In other games with more confidence we’ll create just one or two chances and score two goals. That is football.

“The result was always under control, as a collective we did really well with quality as well. That goal from Gylfi was the best way to finish the match. He’s very strong from that position and it was very good for him because he needed that moment.”