West Ham captain Zouma: We made it very tough for Man City

West Ham captain Kurt Zouma feels they proved their quality in defeat at Manchester City.

The Hammers had the lead through James Ward-Prowse before City fought back to win 3-1 via goals from Jeremy Doku, Bernardo Silva and Erling Haaland.

It was a tough game," Zouma told whufc.com. They made it very tough for us and we made it tough for them. I think it was a very tense game and, obviously, little mistakes made the difference.

It's a football game. It's eleven versus eleven and we knew we could hurt them. We had a few chances where we could have scored one or two more goals, but against the top teams the little details make the difference. They were better at those details in this game.

The beginning of the second half was the killer for us, I would say. Conceding straight away, after just a few seconds in the second half, it feels bad. We tried to stay in the game and gave our all, but it wasn't meant to be today."

He continued: We were so good in the first half, so solid. On the ball, we kept it and hurt them. We moved it quickly and we got around them, In the first half, we were very, very good. The second half we started badly, conceded straight away, but we need to take the positives out of it and move onto the next game.

We have a top team. The team is playing so well at the minute. We've started the season well and this is our first defeat. It was against a top team who are playing well at the minute too, so we need to move on. We can hurt any team and we need to stay on top of that."