Mark Noble doesn’t miss penalties and David De Gea has rarely saved them, but that didn’t stop the Manchester United keeper’s win-saving denial of West Ham’s cold sub captain in Sunday’s 2-1 match in London.
West Ham boss David Moyes inserted Noble when the Red Devils won a penalty in stoppage time, and the captain walked to the spot with a record of not missing a penalty in a half-decade.
De Gea hadn’t saved one in a similar time period, but he went in the right direction and stymied Noble.
[ MORE: Three things we learned ]
Moyes said that Noble was the best choice for the moment but that Declan Rice is next in line and West Ham needs to sort itself with penalties when Noble is not on the pitch.
“Mark Noble is one of the best penalty kick takers we have got,” Moyes said after the game. “It was my choice and my decision. ... I asked Mark and he said he was good and because of his record I thought he was the one most suited to take it.”
All that said, Moyes knows that a draw was there for his team and there’s no doubt the game was tightly-contested in London.
“I thought we played really well and did not think we deserved to be behind,” he said. “It was a proper game, a really good game. I think we played well and did an awful lot of good things and had some really top performances. thought we played really well and did not think we deserved to be behidn. It was a proper game, a really good game. I think we played well and did an awful lot of good things and had some really top performances. We tried to go toe-to toe and in truth, we could be talking about a draw.”