Manuel Pellegrini calls for West Ham to get back to old self

Manuel Pellegrini hopes his West Ham side quickly get back to the team who picked up five victories from seven games in December.

The Hammers manager was reflective following his side's year-ending 2-0 Premier League defeat to Burnley at Turf Moor.

The loss saw West Ham pass up the opportunity to finish 2018 in the top seven, and Pellegrini admitted his side have struggled playing so many fixtures in quick succession, with the same players.

Ahead of Wednesday night's visit of Brighton, he said: "When you lose you want to play immediately but when you have played so many games with the same players, in this case 15 or 16 players - with Diangana, (Xande) Silva and (Conor) Coventry we had three players from the young team - you want to have a little bit more days to recover.

"At least from a Sunday to a Wednesday night you have more than 72 hours and I hope the players can do it.
We play seven games in December we won five, we lost two of them.

"Now we need to try to recover immediately from this defeat, we need to continue adding points. We play now at home to Brighton which will be also difficult but I hope we will see the team we saw [in] all the other games."

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Pellegrini admitted the team are still likely to be without striker Javier Hernandez against Brighton.

"Javier had a muscle injury in the last game we play at home against Watford, he needs at least 10 days more to recover," Pellegrini said.

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