Manuel Pellegrini targets top-half stay for West Ham after moving up to 10th

Manuel Pellegrini says he is targeting a stay in the top half of the Premier League after West Ham moved to 10th with victory over Crystal Palace.

West Ham shrugged off a miserable start to the season, which saw them lose their opening four games, to move into the top 10 for the first time courtesy of their third win in a week.

And having spent £98.6m in the summer, boss Pellegrini wants a prolonged stay in the Premier League's top half after beating Palace 3-2 at the London Stadium.

He told Sky Sports: "We need to win one game to cancel out that bad start with four defeats in a row, but we must look to be in the top half going forward, and we are now in 10th, right in the middle.

"We have three more games to complete the first half of the season, and I hope we can continue adding points."

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The Hammers staged a second-half turnaround to turn a 1-0 deficit into three points, and Pellegrini revealed he had asked his players to change their tactics at the interval.

He said: "I wanted us to continue what we were doing in the first 45 minutes defending, having gone 1-0 down after six minutes and with players like Zaha and Townsend with a lot of speed it would have been easy for them to score the second goal, but we did very well in that respect because they did not have any more chances.

"But we played too fast, we were nervous, and it was impossible in the way we played to create chances. The only thing we talked about was to be calm, prepare better in the final third and have a better final ball.

"We were putting in high crosses and they have two very good centre-backs, and the players started the second half much better."

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