David Moyes admits he made a mistake with Rice – Soucek combo

David Moyes has acknowledged it was a mistake to change the roles of Declan Rice and Tomas Soucek at West Ham.

During West Ham’s success under Moyes, the Rice and Soucek combo in the center of midfield was regarded as one of the best in the Premier League.

But Moyes decided to swap the positions, with Rice bombing forward more which saw Soucek struggling in his new role.

“We’ve tried to get Declan forward up the pitch in the last year or two,” Moyes said ahead of the game against Newcastle (Football.London).

“Which in a way affected Tomas Soucek. Soucek, if you look the year before, got 10 goals arriving in the box.

“What we’ve done is with (Lucas) Paqueta coming in next to Dec, it means Dec has got to do more of a steady job because Lucas is a midfield player closer to being an attacking one than he is a defensive one. We’ve been trying to find ways of scoring goals.

“Sometimes we’ve said we won’t play Tomas to get a more attacking midfielder in alongside Declan. We’ve been tweaking that. We’ve got some results with it but I had brilliant results when I had Tomas and Declan alongside each other as well. But in the first half of the season we’ve not been able to find the goals.”

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