Slaven Bilic has refused to blame his summer signings after their poor showing against Brighton on Friday night.
The four headline additions over the summer (Javier Hernandez, Pablo Zabaleta, Marko Arnautovic and Joe Hart) have had stuttering starts to their careers in east London.
During Friday’s 3-0 defeat to Chris Hughton’s side, Arnautovic was largely ineffective and looked disinterested before being brought off in the second half, while Hart was arguably at fault for Jose Izquierdo’s goal.
However, Bilic has stuck by his additions ahead of their League Cup clash with Tottenham on Wednesday.
“They are not letting me down,” Bilic insisted. “I spoke to him [Arnautovic] already and he wants, he tries, it just at the moment - not only for him - we are all in the same boat and we all have to do better.
“Marko is a great talent, has proved it before, he wanted to come here.
“It has been disrupted with the red card, then the flu, international break but I am very positive and sure that sooner or later he will be really important.”
While the Croatian has backed the former Stoke man to win the Hammers fans over, he revealed that Hart will not be starting at Wembley.
“Tomorrow is going to be Adrian, because he is a cup keeper,” he added.
“I do not want to pin point the players, not in front of the media and that, after we had a bad spell in the first three games when we conceded ten goals, we hit good form with clean sheets and against Brighton we made a few mistakes and shipped three goals.
“But it’s not because of that Adrian will be in goal, it was a plan from the beginning of the season and Adrian did well in his games. He will be in goal tomorrow.”
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