West Ham boss David Moyes has set his players the target of reaching 40 points after rubbing further salt into Norwich City’s wounds with victory over Chelsea last night.

The Hammers saw Norwich and Bournemouth lose heavily to Arsenal and Newcastle respectively earlier on Wednesday evening and took full advantage with a 3-2 home success over Frank Lampard’s high-flying team.

It has moved the Hammers up to 16th and three points clear of the relegation zone with six games remaining, joining Brighton in probably moving out of reach of the Canaries, nine points clear of the Premier League’s bottom side.

West Ham’s expensively assembled squad had lost 2-0 to Wolves and Tottenham since the season had resumed but follow their rejuvenating result with a trip to Newcastle on Sunday, a home game against Burnley on Wednesday and then a trip to Norwich the following Saturday.

“It gets us to 30 points and the next target has to start with a four,” the former Everton and Manchester United boss said. “If we can get to 40 points, then I’m sure we will be safe in the Premier League.

“We’ve still got to aim to get to that points tally and obviously that means winning another three games.”

The Hammers had to overcome a harsh video assistant referee decision, which ruled out a Tomas Soucek goal for a marginal offside, and a penalty converted by Willian.

They equalised through a Soucek header and went ahead through Michail Antonio before Willian curled in a free-kick to equalise for Chelsea, but with a minute to go substitute Andiy Yarmolenko continued his return from injury problems to smash the winner home.

“We’ve all been looking at the results, of course we are, but the biggest thing for me was that I didn’t think we’d been as bad as our results had suggested,” Moyes said, speaking to his club’s official website.

“We lost 2-0 in both games and I said that I thought that the teams we played had played well, and we had made mistakes and missed a couple of chances.

“We did say to the players that we had to change our luck, and we thought the luck could change and it maybe went our way tonight a little bit. We pushed hard, and we did a lot of good things. The players deserve a massive amount of credit.

“Tonight, we took most of our chances. Chelsea, with the team they have, made a number of chances as well. We were up against it at that time against Chelsea, at 2-2, but the players stuck at it and got a good result.”