Bilic brings forward training ground move after Reid, Moses injuries

Slaven Bilic has blamed the quality of pitches at West Ham’s Chadwell Heath training ground for a growing injury list that now includes Winston Reid and Victor Moses.

Moses, on loan from Chelsea, came off in the 37th minute of a 0-0 draw at Manchester United last Saturday holding the back of his leg and the attacker could miss up to six weeks of action.

Defender Reid is also set for a spell on the sidelines, having pulled up with a hamstring complaint during a training session on Wednesday.

The duo join a list of key absentees including Diafra Sakho, Manuel Lanzini, Dimitri Payet and Enner Valencia, although the latter did re-join training on Thursday.

Bilic believes the turf at Chadwell Heath is contributing to West Ham’s woes, prompting the Croatian manager to bring forward plans to move to a new venue at Rush Green.

“There have been a lot of things said since I came here about the pitches that we have here at Chadwell Heath and they’re not ideal,” Bilic said ahead of the home match against Stoke City on Saturday.

“If you saw Reidy’s injury, he slipped because our pitches are very soft on the surface but underneath they are very, very hard, so that’s the worst combination.

“Not only this year, but throughout the years we have a history in that the players are moaning as they are not happy about the quality of the pitches so I’ve decided that we are a club in transition regarding our training facilities and we were planning to move next season to Rush Green, but because of the quality of the pitches we’re going to go there earlier.

“I’ve decided from Monday we are going to move to Rush Green and start to train there because we can’t continue to miss this many players with these kind of pitches, which are not in good shape.”

On West Ham’s fresh injuries, Bilic added: “Winston will go for a scan on Friday. It doesn’t look good, he has done it before and it is one of them where they tell you between four and six weeks. We will know more after the scan.

“Victor is out for four to six weeks. It’s a blow. We now have six injuries. Of course it’s a big blow for us because they are six very important players, but we are going to move on and we have to get over this period without them.”