Michail Antonio hopes West Ham cap off consistent season with European football

Michail Antonio hailed West Ham’s consistency after they inched closer to Europe.

The forward scored his 10th goal of the season in Wednesday’s 3-1 win at West Brom to leave the Hammers one point from the Europa League.

Tottenham’s 2-1 defeat to Aston Villa earlier on Wednesday handed the Hammers the advantage ahead of the Premier League’s finale on Sunday.

They host Southampton and Antonio knows Europe is within their grasp.

He said: “European football is what we went for at the beginning of the season. From Project Restart, our run and our performances have been unbelievable.

“We brought that into this season and we’ve brought it to the end. The Europa League would finish off a great season.

“Now, we’ve got Southampton at the weekend, and we need to put a good season to bed with another three points.

“We saw Tottenham lost and Everton won (1-0 against Wolves), so it was definitely a game we believed we needed to win not just for the Europa League, just to finish the season on a high.”

The Hammers endued a nightmare start after Declan Rice missed a third-minute penalty – when Antonio was brought down by Sam Johnstone – before Tomas Soucek’s own goal gave Albion the lead.

Soucek levelled in the first half before Angelo Ogbonna and Antonio wrapped up the game in the final eight minutes.

“It was massive to be fair,” Antonio told the club’s official website. “They came out and played some free-flowing football, big guys, hitting the channels.

“It was definitely a hard game but we came in, we dug deep, we went one down but we managed to get the game back and win.

“When you miss opportunities, it gives them a lift. They had their fans in to help them give them that little boost and got a good goal from a corner, but with us, we’ve shown this year that we’ve got the ability to go down, come back and get points.

“In these games you always want to try and get back into it just before half-time, and we managed to get that goal so we could come out with a clean slate – it was 0-0 basically.

“All we could do was come out, push hard and make sure we would score more goals.”