There’s no love lost between West Ham United and Tottenham Hotspur, two London clubs that have a pretty strong rivalry.
While Tottenham’s main rivals are fellow North Londoners Arsenal and West Ham are at loggerheads with Millwall, games between Spurs and the Hammers tend to be fierce affairs.
For instance, the last game between Tottenham and West Ham saw Mohammed Kudus sent off for raising his hands to both Micky van de Ven and Pape Sarr.
Kudus received a five-match ban for the incident in the game at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, which Spurs won 4-1.
In addition, Tottenham and West Ham are both around the same place in the Premier League table.
Spurs currently sit 13th in the standings, while West Ham are 15th, though they’re now level on points after their 2-0 win over Leicester City on Thursday night.
Tomas Soucek, who scored in the win over the Foxes, spoke about Tottenham in his post-match interview.
Tomas Soucek says West Ham ‘want to be better’ than Tottenham
Soucek was interviewed by TNT Sports after the match, in which he spoke about a number of subjects including Graham Potter’s impact at the club.
After praising the new West Ham manager, Soucek said his team’s hope is to finish as high as possible and challenge the likes of Tottenham and Manchester United around them.
Soucek noted how West Ham fans saw the Tottenham fixture as a “big derby” and said he wants the Hammers to be “better than them”.
“It’s tough to have this big impact in the half of the season but I think in these last two games what we showed we showed, good spirit, good team effort,” the birthday boy said, as transcribed by BBC Sport.
“I could see in the first half it was a very good performance, in the second we did a few mistakes but still we won 2-0 and it was a great result.
“I think that even this can help our manager believe in what were doing and we are all so grateful for him.
“We know that the season is tough, this season we just want to stay as high as possible. We know we can challenge some big teams.
“Manchester United, Tottenham are around us. Even for West Ham fans it’s a big derby with Tottenham so we want to be better than them.”
What West Ham icon Mark Noble has said about Tottenham rivalry
West Ham legend Mark Noble, now the club’s director of football, spoke to TNT Sports in 2024 about the club’s rivalry with Tottenham.
“I don’t think Arsenal were a massive rival, they were winning titles and all that. There was just something with Spurs that made it such a big rivalry,” said Noble.
“I loved the rivalry, I loved playing in those games. I remember saying to the boys many times, ‘listen, you don’t need a team talk for these games. It is what it is, we’ve got to try and win’.
“I was brought up as a West Ham fan and being around loads of West Ham fans myself, they always ingrained in me that ‘we’ve always got to beat Spurs’.”
Noble also recalled a disagreement in the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium visitors’ changing room after West Ham gave Spurs their first defeat at their new stadium in April 2019.
“I’ve come in and done the press, and the players wanted to take a photo together and I’m like ‘not a chance are we having a photo here’, because I believed that we should expect to beat Spurs,” Noble said.
“It was probably a little bit of ego because I didn’t want a photo to come out of us just because we beat Spurs 1-0. For me that wasn’t good enough, I needed to go on and be better as a club than that.”