Well, there’s something new. With 55 minutes gone and West Ham’s players showing vim and fight on the pitch the home crowd at the London stadium could be seen up on its feet, waving its arms and sending a sustained chorus of “David Moyes’ claret and blue army” rolling around this vast, chilly, cantilevered bowl.

As moments of ignition go, a messy 1-1 home draw against a meandering Leicester City is hardly a thunderclap. But whatever happens from here in the temp-to-perm mini-reign of Moyes as West Ham manager, he will always have Leicester, Friday night and the feeling of a spark in the grate at last.

This was a first home game for the new manager, 16 days on from his slightly starchy, perma-grinning unveiling upstairs in the lavish Great Briton suite. Moyes seems to have spent much of the intervening time calling for greater effort, promising above all discipline and “basics”.

It worked too, up to a point. Something shifted here, and not just for West Ham. Moyes came to the London Stadium having not won a home game as manager since 16 December. He still hasn’t. But there was a vigour about West Ham, a feeling of trapped energy inside this huge, awkardly geared stadium and for Moyes a night inside a football stadium he will have enjoyed more than any other in quite a while.

In his newspaper column on the day of this game Moyes had set great store in two things: running and shouting. Moyes is desperate to improve the players’ fitness and here they did run hard right up to the final moments. Shouting is also an issue. “It’s when I stop shouting that you know I’ve given up on you,” Moyes said. Which is an odd kind of rallying call but perhaps a fitting one given the struggle to generate a feeling of boisterous home-town comfort inside this oddly troubling stadium.

This is clearly a major part of West Ham’s unease in the last two seasons. The crowd here have done all they can and at times they create a real sense of heat. At others, for all the bubbles, the Moyes-dust sprinkled over the occasion, there is simply an emptiness, a sense of disjunct in a place that really should be a source of strength. And you may find yourself living in a large, empty, hollow bowl. And you may find yourself In another part of the world. And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?

It is a question some West Ham fans have been asking in recent weeks. Here, for all the official attendance figures, the London Stadium was two-thirds full at kick-off, with open patches of white seats dotted around. There was the usual game, pre-match attempt to force a feeling of urgency into this vast open space, like trying to stage an intimate meal for two at both ends of a 40-foot antique dining table. And Moyes was out straight away to the edge of his vast chalk rectangle, hunched in his quilted coat, clapping his hands and pointing, and trying to convey a sense of intensity across those distant green acres.

The huge pitchside perimeter does not help. Like Slaven Bilic before him Moyes looks minuscule out there, alone in all that empty space, tiny hands beating the air. He was sitting by the time Leicester scored the opening goal with eight minutes gone. Jamie Vardy skipped down the left and crossed low. Angelo Ogbonna air-kicked and Marc Albrighton tucked the ball past a static Joe Hart, who looked briefly baffled, shocked to find himself standing inside an aluminium rectangle trying to do things.

Moyes sat motionless on his bench as the Leicester fans sang, “You’re getting sacked in the morning.” At which point something happened. West Ham began to rally. Moyes had shuffled his team here, bringing in the mercurial Arthur Masuaku. It was Masuaku who led the fightback, reeling off a few driving runs and showing the athleticism Moyes wants to pack into this team.

Andy Carroll also played, although playing is a rather gentle verb to describe what Carroll does on a football pitch these days. A lack of mobility has left him snorting and gasping, always a little short. Carroll does not play football. He inflicts it. He wreaks football. But for a while he really did put himself about, chopping windpipes, winning headers, crashing into the advert hoardings, appearing dramatically in the centre of things, like the fuselage of a burning Messerschmitt tumbling from the skies.

West Ham’s drive was rewarded just before half-time, Cheikhou Kouyaté heading in from a corner to spread a jauntiness around the home fans as the players trooped off. West Ham fought on, pushed Leicester back, might have even won this game. As first steps go, this was cause for a little cautious optimism all round.