James Ward-Prowse made no excuses following West Ham’s “embarrassing” defeat to Crystal Palace.

Whenever West Ham go through a heavy defeat, James Ward-Prowse is seemingly the first to speak about it. Maybe he got accustomed to it after Southampton’s famous 9-0 defeats, or maybe he is just a leader in the camp.

Either way, the midfielder was rightfully infuriated with how his team performed in their 5-2 defeat to Crystal Palace and was not willing to make any excuses for the performance. “You can talk about the way you play with the ball but I think out of possession we didn’t show enough aggression and togetherness against Crystal Palace. I think that cost us,” he told the official site.

“There are quite a few reasons why [we conceded four goals in the first 31 minutes] but I don’t think the excuse of playing on Thursday night is anything we can use. If we want to be a top team and be contenders for a European place, you can’t perform like that against one of the best teams in the world at the moment Bayer Leverkusen, and then come to Crystal Palace and perform in the way that we did.”

While it’s not out of the question, it is extremely hard to imagine West Ham getting Europe again next season. They sit 2 points behind both Manchester United and Newcastle but have played 2 more games. Not to mention Chelsea who are 1 point behind the Hammers with 3 games in hand.

However, Ward-Prowse knows that they still need to give their absolute everything as there still is a slim chance of those around them slipping up, but a good result against Liverpool at the weekend is now a must.

“We didn’t need anything said to us at half-time because we all knew what went wrong,” he explained.

“You can’t allow any team in football to score goals as easily as we did, especially in the Premier League. It doesn’t matter if you’re playing a team at the bottom or the top of the table, they will punish you.”

“There is still a lot of football to play, and because this is the business end of the season we know every game is magnified in that way. [Liverpool] is a fantastic game to bounce back in and hopefully, we can give the fans something to cheer about against them.”