West Ham boss David Moyes will be without five senior players for his side’s final game of the Europa Conference League group stages tonight.
With West Ham having already topped the group with a game to spare, Moyes has opted to leave a number of his senior players back in England, for what is a dead-rubber game against bottom of the Group B, FCSB.
The notable omissions were not individually covered by Moyes in his pre-match press conference. But, through football.london, it is believed that the likes of Declan Rice, Tomas Soucek, Kurt Zouma, Jarrod Bowen and Gianluca Scamacca are among those senior omissions, with the quintet not pictured in training on Thursday morning.
Dead-Rubber clash = opportunities galore
Despite this affair being almost meaningless to Moyes in the grand scheme of things, the boss does have the chance to achieve a record-setting feat, by winning all six games of the group – which has was not achieved by any team in the Europa Conference League’s inaugural campaign last term.
With that, there are still some senior players in the travelling party to Romania, but the boss will indeed present the Hammers’ youngsters with opportunities.
Via football.london, Moyes said: “The biggest motivation is that we’ve won the group and we now need to hopefully finish it off if we can.
“We are going to give some younger players an opportunity in the game.
“We’ve left the bulk of the players back home and we’re looking forward to the game. There is a lot of senior players involved, they all want to be playing and we will hopefully go there and get that sixth victory.
“We’re not full of young players but there’s a couple of young players that are going to start tomorrow night and we will give them an opportunity and maybe some more will get an opportunity which maybe in some of the other games, we weren’t able to do. We hope we can do that, but we still want to win the game.”
You would expect the likes of Freddie Potts, Keenan Forson, Regan Clayton, Harrison Ashby and Oliver Scarles to feature in some capacity, having been involved in this season’s competition already, in what is a game that presents opportunities galore for both senior and young professionals at the club.
