Allardyce on cloud nine after Premier League return

West Ham’s playoff final victory over Blackpool to return to the Premier League ‘means everything’ to the club, manager Sam Allardyce said.

A late Ricardo Vaz Te strike fired the east London club to a 2-1 win in their Championship playoff clash to claim what is touted as the biggest prize in domestic football, with the Hammers set to earn up to 90 million pounds from the victory.

Allardyce saluted the efforts of his players after a downturn in form earlier in the season meant they missed out on automatic promotion.

“It’s everything to me. I’ve been in the Premier League for 10 years or so, and I wanted to experience a successful season,” Allardyce told Sky Sports.

“It was very difficult at the start to turn the club around with the relegation problem we’ve had. But we’ve turned it around, and we came good right at the very end.

“Full credit to the players, and full credit to Blackpool because for a playoff with the nerves, I thought it was a magnificent game, end-to-end, and in the end we got one more goal than Blackpool.”

West Ham have bounced straight back up to the top flight after one season in the Championship, but the last-gasp winner is not something the Hammers have been used to this season.

“Funnily enough, it’s 49 games (played this season), and it’s the first time we’ve won a game in the last few minutes,” Allardyce said.

“All season we’ve gone, never won one all season; I had (co-owner) David Sullivan going on at me, ‘Why don’t we ever win a game in the last minute?’ and now we’ve won one.

“I’m sure him and (co-owner) David Gold will be happy, and as you can see from all the fans here, we’re just delighted to be back in the Barclays Premier League.”

Blackpool counterpart Ian Holloway said he was proud of his players despite the loss but admits his team lost their belief after Vaz Te’s late strike.

Holloway rued his side’s missed chances through Stephen Dobbie and Alex Baptiste but congratulated his opposite number on his team’s triumph.

“Well done to West Ham. It looked like it was going to extra-time,” he said.

“I was very pleased with our performance overall; I think when they scored we lost it a little bit, lost our shape, lost our belief. I asked them to do certain things out of time.

“Like my lot, they went out in the second half, fantastic performance, and we’ll be rueing the day we missed a couple of chances, but that’s life.”

Holloway hinted that there was a foul in the build up to West Ham’s winner but chose not to dwell on the incident.

“I thought the second (goal) looked as though there was a foul, but listen, at the end of the day they’ve just scored on 88 minutes so I’ve got to appeal for something,” he said.

“Sometimes in life it goes against you, and it did that time. All you can do is congratulate the opponents, I thought we gave a great account of ourselves today.

“On another day, we’ve created more than enough chances to have done what we needed to do, but unfortunately we didn’t.”