West Ham United number two Neil McDonald insists The Hammers are still targeting a top-eight Premier League finish, despite their faltering form.

Saturday's 3-0 defeat at Arsenal means West Ham have now won just two of their last 16 games in all competitions but McDonald has echoed boss Sam Allardyce in pin-pointing a top-ten place as the club's aim.

He told the club website: “Our progression is trying to get into the top eight if we possibly can. At the start of the season it was top ten and with the points we started off with it was realistic to set the target a little bit higher.

“We just fell short over the last four or five games against the top teams in the league. Hopefully we can pick up a few points now and believe in ourselves as we have done against the top teams.

“We’ve been finished off sometimes and let a couple of goals in so we need to be smarter in how we manage the rest of the games.”

McDonald continued: “We all know that we have had a lot of tough games against a lot of the top six teams and the manager is happy with certain aspects of the game and unhappy with others.

“We have had some really good performances but we just haven’t had the results and we have just got to marry that up now in the next six games now to try to push us back up the table.

“They are all difficult games in the Premier League but we feel as though we’ve got a good chance of putting more points on the board and pushing up that table towards the target that we set.”