Hammered! A West Ham blog

The pain of last season has slowly faded away and now, just weeks away from the start of the Championship season most fans are beginning to get excited at the prospect of seeing a West Ham team that may actually be in contention for something at the end of the term.

The appointment of Sam Allardyce for me was an unusual one.  At odds with the home-grown, Academy-based appointment that I was expecting from Gold & Sullivan, Allardyce shows that, if nothing else, promotion is expected.  The usual media soundbites spilled forth when the appointment was announced.  Sam had dropped down a division to manage and we should be grateful for that.  We’ll ignore the convenient fact that if you’re not in employment, you can’t really say that you’ve dropped down to take a job.  I mean, you could rephrase it “Being paid to manage a club – any club – in the Championship is better than not being paid and being out of work”  Still, maybe that’s my scepticism.  After all, Sam is a proven manager who, although never setting the world alight, has not just been relegated (a la Avram) and is not cutting his teeth (a la Zola).

The key to his success, and his acceptance by the fans was always going to be the signings he brought in and the success he had on the pitch.  Signing Nolan was a masterstroke, and gave hope that Sam may be a big enough name to attract decent Premier League-class players to play in the Championship.  Optimism was on the up.  Maybe this season would be a good season after all?  However, the signing that followed (Faye) and the players we were linked with, notably mostly ex-Bolton players, tinges the start of the new season with pessismism.

Is it really so difficult to see that we need full backs?  The incoming signing of Matty Taylor (another Bolton player!) may solve the left-side of defence, but it still leaves us playing either Faubert or the relatively unproven Spence at right-back.  Although we still have Green, Parker and Cole, you can guarantee that all three will be subject to deadline day bids by Premier League teams and we won’t have replacements lined up for them, so we will be relying on an already-thin squad to cover a season which is several games longer.

David Gold has already been in the press, stating that we have several weeks to secure new signings, which is true, but doesn’t take into account the fact that the season starts a month before the transfer window finishes, and although better players coming in is welcomed at any time, there is every chance we will have thrown away precious points in the first few games, and then will be hoping that new signings gel immediately with their new team mates.

However, despite the thin squad and the lack of signings, it’s obvious that West Ham still have the ability to do well this season.  Though it’s true that they will be targetted by teams as a game to win (the old adage of being everyones Cup Final game), they should also have the talent and dare we say the managerial nous to win games.  Whether this is done in the West Ham tradition of passing and moving – something that we haven’t actually done for some time – or whether it’s a kick and rush game remains to be seen.  I suspect it will be more of the latter than the former, such is the desire and need to get promoted quickly, and we will see a rush of doing whatever it takes to win games. Should that happen, it will finally see the new-era fans take over.  The fans who want success, who demand points no matter how they are won.

No longer will The Academy bring through players that can pass the ball out of defence. No longer will the idea of playing attractive football above all else be considered the done thing.

West Ham chairman David Gold has just been on TalkSPORT radio talking about the move to the Olympic Stadium.  This is what he had to say.  Apologies if it’s a bit rough, but I did my best to catch what he was saying and was typing as it went out live:

On the Olympic Stadium bid which went in today:

Any football fan knows the warmth that a win against your rivals brings you.  It’s a warmth that envelops your body and gives you a glow for days afterwards.  It’s amazing what a well earned point against Stoke, the promise of a cup run and a win against Spurs can do for the positivity around the Boleyn Ground.  From worrying whether we would get to October without a point in the league and out of the Carling Cup, thanks to a horrible start brought about by the fixture list and the West Ham way of historically failing to do well in cup competitions, we are now looking ahead optimistically.

Fulham at home is our next game, and given that they have lost their main striker in Zamora, it looks as though we could pick up another win (back to back wins, when was the last time? It feels like forever), and then build on that win decent performances away to Wolves and then when Newcastle come to Upton Park at the end of the month.

Suddenly we are thinking that the next three games should garner at least five points, taking us to a lower mid-table position, a place which – far from being ideal – is better than we would have hoped for when we were propping up the rest of the league.

Any West Ham fan will be used to false dawns, and I don’t expect the team to play with the passion they showed against Spurs.  I do expect a team performance though, and I think Avram Grant has enough about him to maintain the positivity going into Fulham. Dropping Cole may have given the striker a kick up the backside that he so badly needed.  It also gave Piquionne and Obinna a chance to show what they can do together, and they seemed to grasp the opportunity with both hands, and hopefully will be set to start the next couple of matches.

With Hitzlsperger, Collison and Hines all due to return from injury in the next few weeks, the competition for places will step up too, which can only be a good thing for the club.

Optimism. It’s an unfamiliar feeling, but long may it continue.

West Hams sudden finding of form with two wins in three undefeated matches has surprised some. Not West Ham fans though.  All season we have seen extended periods of play where the ball has been sprayed around the pitch, where the team has put together pass after pass, and where the crowd has been lifted by the players moving as a unit.

The one thing we have lacked for some time though is a decent right back.  The issue was originally addressed in the transfer window with the (in my view over-expensive) purchase of Winston Reid, a New Zealand international signed for a few million.  Right now he is playing for the reserves having had his first team chances restricted, and that doesn’t look like changing any time soon.

With Upson suffering a shocking lack of form over the past 9 months or so, and Ilunga being a shadow of the player he was in his first season at left back, the whole defence has suffered, and not once have we fielded the same back four for two matches in a row.  Thankfully Grant (or maybe Sullivan, who knows with our club?) seems to have noticed that something needed changing, and brought in Lars Jacobsen on a free transfer from Blackburn to shore up the defence.

Jacobsen’s deadline day arrival was too late to make a difference to the first three games of the season, but slotting into the team for the first time as they faced Chelsea, he helped to keep the scoreline down to a respectable 3-1 at a time when the League leaders were slamming 4 or more goals past everyone. Since then he has played at right back in both subsequent league games, the 1-1 draw with Stoke and the massive victory over Spurs.

In the moment itself, being a right back at West Ham means going relatively unrecognised for your efforts.  History is kinder, as fans often only recognise the importance of a competent player in that position once that player has gone – Lucas Neill being the prime example.

When we look back at this season, which is barely a month old as I write this, I believe that we will point to Jacobsen’s arrival as a key turning point, bringing stability to a back four that so desperately needs it, and bringing an understanding to the position that we have lacked in recent times.  He will never be a match winner, and I doubt he will be recognised for his competence, but the one thing he will do is prevent us from conceding quite so many. Using that as a building block for the fragile confidences that both our keeper and also our team captain seem to possess, the only way is up for West Ham this season.

With our first point of the season coming away at Stoke, followed by our first away victory in over a year at Sunderland (who, lest we forget, were fielding pretty much their first team against our mix of first teamers and subs bench), as well as a couple of decent first half performances, hopes are high going into the weekends game at Spurs.

Spurs, who laughably still see Arsenal as their main London rivals in the Premier League, have a much better side, a manager that can motivate a team and the sort of luck that would see them win the National Lottery twice in a row. Yet still the majority of Hammers feel that we can nick something from the game.  Nick is definitely the right word.  Tottenham should, to all intents and purposes, dominate the game, pressurise our back four into errors and leave with a 3 goal victory.

That said, one hopes that this weekend – a rainy one in London and a month since the Premier League kicked off the new season – will be the one where it suddenly clicks with the players.  Where they realise their skill levels and potential, where they respond to the chants and roars from the crowd, where they up their game and play skillful, attacking football.

It looks as though we will again be without Hitz, our “German Captain” (West Ham PR at its best with the ‘captain’ bit), and it looks as though we will once again change a back four that looks as though the one thing it could really do with is continuity and familiarity.  Green will be back in goal after seeing his place go to his impressive understudy in the Carling Cup midweek game.

Being bottom with only a point at this stage is a terrible start, yet impressively Hammers fans have reacted remarkably cooly about the situation, choosing – on public forums at least – to back their team and their charisma-lacking manager, pointing out that no other team have had such a difficult start to the season, and realising that, given the team we have, we can get out of the rut we are in.

This would be the ideal time to get one over on our old rivals, and also Harry Redknapp, a wheeler-dealer manager who has had more than his fair share of success over us in the past with Spurs and Pompey. There’s nothing that us fans can do apart from get behind the team. It’s down to the team to build on the past two games, to raise their game and for each player to play their hearts out.

I hate this game historically as we rarely seem to get a result, but maybe this year will be different.  Just maybe.

Seeing as being a West Ham fan is pretty depressing at the moment, I’ve chosen not to say anything about our first Premier League point of the campaign, or our first away victory in over a year.  Instead, I’m going back to the age-old discussion of the move to the Olympic Stadium.

Listening to Stop! Hammer Time’s latest podcast, they mentioned that, according to their sources, the move to the Olympic Stadium is now a “done deal” and is set to be announced very soon.

This will likely have Hammers fans up in arms.  Why should we move from our home at Upton Park? What sense does it make to not own our own stadium? What about the atmosphere and how that will suffer? You can just about imagine the outcry now. Unfortunately, us Hammers fans don’t have a say.  Yes, you can make your points verbally, online or by writing to the club, but let’s be honest, Gold and Sullivan will drive this through even if it means going against the wishes of every single West Ham season ticket holder, club member, armchair fan and those that once saw the official West Ham bus on the motorway. In short, it’s going to happen and we need to get used to it.

The arguments for staying are plenty, but looking at things logically, some just don’t stack up.  Yes, there are some good reasons to stay, I’m sure, but let’s look at the main points.

We could just redevelop the East Stand. Yes, we could.  The £120m that is apparently going to be used to adapt the OS to our benefit could be spent on upgrading the ground.  However, part of the £120m is coming from external sources tied in to the Olympic Stadium, so straight away the amount we could spend on the existing ground is reduced. Not only that, but anyone that has been to Upton Park in recent times will tell you what a pain it is getting in and out on a matchday.  Add an extra 10,000 fans and it’s only going to get worse.  With one station and two tube lines running through the area, and roads that simply haven’t been designed to cope with the volume of traffic we have already, let alone providing enough car parking spaces, this argument is almost immediately invalid.  Added to the fact that there is simply so little room around the existing stadium to expand and it’s almost completely non-existent.

Stratford  has had huge amounts of investment in recent years, and has much better transport links than Upton Park.  With two major tube lines (separate tube lines, unlike the very-similar Hammersmith & City and District lines at Upton Park) as well as DLR and Overground links, not to mention being a Eurostar hub, getting to and from Stratford is much easier than what we currently experience.

We wouldn’t own our own stadium. Yes, another good point.  But where do you stand on renting a property versus owning your own home?  Yes, it’s a scaled up version but there are good and bad points to both sides.  Selling Upton Park would release some finance to pay off some of the debt that hangs around our necks. Granted, not huge amounts, but certainly a few million.  We would then not have to pay out for repairs and general upkeep above and beyond everyday wear and tear, which again saves us money.  Once the roof has been installed, and toilets fitted, the ground will be as well adapted to our needs as it could possibly be, and let’s be honest, Upton Park is hardly a vision of comfort as it stands. We also get the added benefit of being the main leaseholder, giving us a very big sway over what goes on at the new place, something that will no doubt be used to good advantage by the board in sub-letting the stadium out for other uses.  Expect close-season concerts, boxing matches and other money-spinning ideas, coupled in with higher sponsorship from companies that will naturally regard the new stadium in a much more positive light than the existing or modified Upton Park.

The atmosphere will suffer as the fans will be so far from the pitch. Hold on a second.  Have you been to a home match recently? The atmosphere stretches as far as the stand you’re in singing every now and then.  Gone are the days when the South Bank responded to songs from the East Bank of “South Bank, South Bank, give us a song!”.  In fact – and this backs up the “too far from the pitch” argument – the atmosphere went downhill massively when the West Stand was built and moved back from the pitch.  Anyone that went to games in the 90s or earlier will remember how close the East Stand was to the pitch and how loud an atmosphere was created as a result. Moving to the Olympic Stadium will certainly not improve the atmosphere, but neither will it make it much worse than it is already.

Football is evolving, and has been since the Premier League was introduced.  By standing still and sticking with our Upton Park roots, we risk going down a path that sees us left behind as other teams strive to improve and grow.  We will never be a Top 4 team, that we can all pretty much agree on, but as we watch our Premier League neighbours move grounds and consolidate what they have, sitting still is not going to help us.

Leave the past behind, embrace the future. It’s going to happen anyway, regardless of what anyone wants, as Sullivan and Gold have deemed it best for the club. Do we really want to be seen as a club with fans that moan at everything? Personally I’d rather leave that for the likes of Spurs.

Three games in, bottom of the league. Score once, conceded nine, and only three games gone.

Pay attention to the Official Site and you’d be forgiven for thinking that things will only get worse as the ESPN advert that is still running is informing anyone visiting the site that we’re playing Man Utd next weekend as well.

That’s not to say that things are likely to get any easier. With Chelsea and Tottenham visiting Upton Park in two of the three games that the club play in September, and a tricky away visit to Stoke, who will no doubt have their Player of the Year and ex-Hammer Matthew Etherington firing on all cylinders, it’s likely that West Ham will begin in October in the bottom three, if not plastered to the bottom with zero points.

Not an ideal start by any stretch of the imagination, but for all of the naysayers, let’s just remember that when the fixture list was announced, the general feeling was that we’d be lucky to get through the first six fixtures with a handful of points.  Villa and Bolton are generally bogey sides for us, and though one would have hoped to maybe pick up a point or two, it’s not the end of the world.

What we need to remember is that we’ve got the difficult games out of the way. What we need to do is to judge how the season is going at Christmas.  Our response to being bottom will be interesting to say the least, and Avram Grant certainly won’t want to be associated with having a reputation for taking teams down following his relegation with Portsmouth last year.

There are two days left of the transfer window, and with Spurs sniffing around Parker and Liverpool around Cole it’ll be interesting to see who goes and who, if anyone, remains. For now, we have a team more than capable of climbing out of trouble, albeit perhaps in a couple of months.

I have faith that we can do it.  That’s why I choose not to boo the team off at half time and full time. I even believe that we’ll bring in players that will strengthen the team – namely a decent right back and a striker.

If only optimism was infectious.

The club has more spin than a yoyo at times. It’s getting to the stage where everything that comes from the club is poured over, and searched through for hidden meaning.  They don’t help themselves when they announce a new signing on the Official Site and put a paragraph in with the line:

“The potential recruit is a young international, who represented his country with distinction at the 2010 FIFA World Cup.”

If there was ever a way to set yourself up for a fall, it has to be revealing information before it’s been confirmed.  Last week we had the links with Beckham, with Gold going on BBC Essex and giving an interview where he stated that he felt it was at a 50/50 stage as to whether Beckham would sign or not.  Just a few days later and Beckham’s representatives issue a statement saying that he as had no contact with the club whatsoever.

Once the potential signing of a young international was hinted at, West Ham message boards went into meltdown trying to work out who we had lined up.  The general consensus was that Kevin Prince Boateng was a possibility, and a welcome one at that, though there was also a chance that we could end up with the Algerian goalkeeper that was mentioned as a rumour a couple of weeks ago.

This morning the New Zealand Herald reports that the player is their defender Winston Reid, scorer of their first goal at the World Cup.  If this is true then it has disappointed many fans, simply because by leaking news of it on the Official Site it gives the impression that we are likely to sign a prestigious name, or a pretty good player, when in fact, with all respect to Reid, this transfer should have been tied up and completed without much fanfare at all.

Winston Reid scores in the World Cup

I’d like to say that the club will learn from its mistakes, but seeing as the continued public chasing of Gudjohnsen in January led to the deal being hijacked by ‘Arry and Spurs, as well as the aforementioned Beckham saga, it seems as though we will always be quick to talk about things that haven’t happened yet, or building up things that are likely to be fairly inconsequential.

That said, I’d rather have the club compared to a yoyo for its spin rather than the up and down relegation / promotion fodder we were in the 90s.

I was fully prepared to come and have a (slight) dig at our owners this morning, after David Gold appeared on BBC Essex last night and spoke coherently about the club, their ambitions and the Olympic Stadium.  Unfortunately he finished it by talking about Scott Parker.

“Can you guarantee Parker will be at the club at the end of the transfer window?” was the fairly direct question asked at Gold, and his response?

“One thingYou can never say 100%, so never say never. Having said that, I promise the fans we will do everything in our power that Parker starts for West Ham when we kick off the new season.”

For me, a 30-something year old West Ham fan, that tells me that Parker’s being sold at the end of the transfer window, or possibly in January.  The wording of the statement could be passed off as a non-prepared response to an unexpected question, but it seemed guarded and slightly open to intepretation.

Then, just as I was settling down to have a quick pop, West Ham release a statement on the official site saying that they had turned down an official bid for Parker from Spurs. It goes on to quote David Sullivan:

“I made a promise that I would not sell Scott and I will not, for any amount of money, break that promise to the West Ham supporters. Scott is not for sale at any price, to anyone. West Ham supporters, for far too long, have had owners that sell their best players and promise one thing and do another. This is a new era. We are building a bigger, better West Ham and when we make a promise, we honour it.”

Big words from someone who should possibly know better than to make such bold promises.  Of course, this could just be a ploy on behalf of the board, saying such a public statement knowing that Parker is keen on a move himself, and thus forcing Parkers hand. If he wants to move, he will have to put in a transfer request.  If that happens, the board will no doubt hold up their hands, say that the really, really wanted to keep the player but if he wants to go then it’s all they can do to get the best fee they can for him.

Of course, I am just a cynic…

At the risk of being accused of tub-thumping for Gold, Sullivan and Brady, the latter’s most recent newspaper interview, which appeared in the Independent On Sunday over the weekend was another example of the professionalism that the club is showing these days.

Brady inside Upton Park

There are a lot of fans that are still to be won over by the brashly spoken male duo and their young CEO, but it’s a refreshing change from either the constant silence of the Terry Brown era, or the self-hyped failure-to-deliver antics of the Icelanders.

The plans that Brady speaks about are bold indeed.  Talking of her plans for the Olympic Stadium she declares that West Ham taking the stadium is best for everyone, even suggesting that the club taking over the site would prevent Mayor Boris Johnson from having a White Elephant forever attached to his tenure in charge over London.

There are also suggestions that the club are looking outside the box, with possible season ticket tie-ins to other sports, including athletics (lest we forget that this is a stadium built for such a sport), cricket, rugby and even the NFL.  I think her suggestion that we could take 60,000 fans to the new stadium is believable, though it would be easy to read it as though this would be a regular occurrence, when I think even the most hardened fan would agree that we would only likely get three-quarters of that figure on a match-by-match basis.

Continuing in a positive tone, the article quotes Brady as saying “Our plan would bring soul to this part of London which it needs so badly. It would be two big regenerations schemes in one – our Upton Park site could be developed, helping the district, and then the area around the Olympic stadium. ” and reveals that she has requested – and is confident of getting – a six-month exclusivity period from the government to allow her to put together a proper bid, one which, given the positive approach and handling of the questions in this interview, could well prove to be successful.

How the Olympic Stadium will look on completion

It was also refreshing to hear that Brady has pumped in £2m of her own money for a small percentage of shares in the club, meaning that she believes in what she is doing and what she is trying to achieve.

Overall Brady comes across as a business woman who knows what she is talking about.  She’s not daft, having worked in football for 18 years now, and although she keeps a very low profile compared to that of her two bosses, it’s refreshing to hear about the positive plans for the future of the club, especially as only six months ago we were close to going under.

“Upton Park can hold only 32,000 spectators”, the Lady of Upton Park claims, “and we’ve had some of the best players in the world – Bobby Moore, Trevor Brooking – it’s endless.”

The interview ended without Brady being probed from more information about our greatest players, given that she’s happy to say we have an endless list and could then only name the two players that have stands named after them at Upton Park (good job she didn’t quote “Moore, Brooking, West Stand and Chicken Run”).  As for 32,000 fitting in the ground, maybe it’s a subtle ploy to not pay tax on the extra 4,000 fans that can (and do) squeeze into the ground on a regular basis.

Or maybe Brady is just showing that you needn’t know much about the club you work for when you’re good at the business side of things.