West Ham midfielder Kieron Dyer desperate to start against Aston Villa

West Ham midfielder Kieron Dyer is playing his way back to fitness and has promised both he and the squad will be sharp come the start of the season.

The former Ipswich man played an hour against his former club in Saturday's 1-0 at Portman Road and the pacy wingman is delighted to be on the road to recovery after numerous hamstring problems.

"It's been a long time since I played an hour but it's petrol in the tank, as they say," he said. "We've got another game on Tuesday and one on Saturday, so hopefully I'll get 90 minutes in one of those games and it will set me up for Villa.

"I've been back to Ipswich a few times since I've left and it's a great family club.

"They always treat their ex-players with respect and with a great ovation and it was the same on Saturday and I really appreciated it.

"I was really stiff towards the end but we've had a really difficult training week and you could see from our performance that everyone was very tired and nobody really had any explosive pace. Ipswich gave us a good test.

"We're all aiming for 14 August and it's going really well."

Dyer will be hopeful of making the starting XI at Villa Park, although he admits he is unsure what poisition he will be playing in.

"That was my fifth position in pre-season so it's good! I've said I will play anywhere and I'm obviously a versatile player and with Matty Upson coming off early I dropped back into right-back and I quite enjoyed it actually!

"I started my Ipswich career at right-back when Gus Uhlenbeek got injured so I know the position quite well and I really enjoyed it."

And come the match against Aston Villa the former England international is confident the Hammers will pull off a positive result.

"The fans who were there on Saturday should not read too much into the performance because this past week in training has been really hard, as I said. We were below-par but the manager and the coaching staff expected it," he added.

"We are going to be tapering off training in the next couple of weeks so we'll be sharper coming into matches and you'll get a better indication of where we are.