West Ham manager David Moyes puts a lot of the blame for his side’s defeat to Newcastle on the officiating.

The amount of poor decisions that have gone against West Ham this season is nothing short of bewildering. Just over the past few months there has been controversial officiating in their matches against Sheffield United, Burnley, Aston Villa and now Newcastle.

Unsurprisingly, it is something that David Moyes has been incredibly frustrated with and while he accepts that part of the blame is on the Hammers, he seems to believe that the referee was the main reason that his side didn’t walk away with a positive result.

“We are trying to challenge for Europe, we wanted to beat one of the teams close to us, and for long periods we looked like we were [going to beat Newcastle],” he told the official site.

“We scored some good goals, but when we got 3-1 up we just weren’t showing the elements of defensive duty which you have to do. It looked too easy today, but I have to say that so many decisions went against us today.”

“There’s disappointment, more than anything, that we didn’t win the game. Ultimately we should have come away with points from the game and we didn’t do so.”

“The [second] penalty kick is a huge turning point,” the gaffer elaborated, “but I also thought we made a change [by replacing Michail Antonio with Phillips on 69 minutes] because we felt as if they had got on top and missed a couple of chances.”

“We tried to give ourselves another midfield player at 3-1 up and we didn’t want to wait for it to get to 3-2. Probably that decision didn’t work on the day, but more importantly I think the boy puts his foot in front of Kalvin and I don’t know how he’s supposed to see his leg.”

“The penalty kick makes it 3-2 and we had been doing OK. We gave up a couple of chances before that which I didn’t like and they had started to get some control shooting down the hill, but we had another day when very few things went for us.”

However, the penalty wasn’t the only decision that he wished to highlight as he believes Dan Burns’ barge on Mohammed Kudus should have resulted in a red card.

“I’ve not had the chance to look back at it yet, but feeling was he (Dan Burn) pushed Mo in the back when he was going through on goal. That would have been a red card and could have changed the game.”

“We have to get ourselves back on it and show more resilience and toughness, which we didn’t do today,” he concluded.