Frustrating afternoon salvaged by the Chicken Dance

A West Ham United side had Kevin Nolan’s last gasp effort to be grateful for after gifting a goal to the opposition. This trend must stop soon because if we didn’t have the strike at the end, we would have dominated a game that we almost gave to Sunderland.

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The side was unchanged from the draw with Norwich City with just a few alterations on the bench, though one Hammer who was sitting the game out on the bench was a very despondent and fed up James Tomkins. I sit in the East Stand, the old chicken run, where the players do their warm ups and drills before the game and seeing James Tomkins doing his pre game preparations was worrying. Half hearted would be an under statement, feebly doing stretches and just his general attitude and mood was one of embarrassment. We’ve been watching James excel into a mature, talented defender, one of the best young English centre backs in the Premier League in my own opinion, but I’ve never seen him looked so out of confidence and touch with the crowd and his colleagues.

Though with James on the bench he had the perfect view of a West Ham defence giving away another goal. Having started the game quite evenly, from a position of no danger what so ever, the usually assured James Collins threw this start away by playing the ‘Hollywood Ball’. His pass was poor and it gave possession straight back to Sunderland and they quickly had three men running on to a defense of two. The outcome was Steven Fletcher stroking the ball into the far corner. Keeping the run of four Sunderland goals, all four goals coming from the Scot.

From that point on, it almost ended the attacking threat from Sunderland, who was quite poor for the rest of the game, almost inviting pressure on to their own back four. Though it was down to West Ham’s inability to finish that the side were left frustrated. Ricardo Vaz Te, Carlton Cole and Nolan all missed the target, before Kevin Nolan saw Simon Mignolet make a world class save to deny Nolan’s acrobatic effort.

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The second half was much of the same, dominated the game but chance after chance was spurned or an easy save for Simon Mignolet, though the game changing moment was when Sam Allardyce brought Matt Jarvis, who took temporary right back, Craig Gardner apart. A problem that West Ham had for the first 60 minutes, was the fact that we were very narrow, Mark Noble and Mohamed Diame were forced to continuously play the ball inside and look for Cole or Nolan, but Vaz Te and Taylor made little to no impact in the game bar a few incidents. As Matt Jarvis and Yossi Benayoun joined the game, we seemed to open up 20 more yards of attacking space and with the quality of Jarvis’s final delivery it looked inevitable we would finally equalize, which we did with just a few moments left as Nolan wheeled away with his familiar Chicken dance.

“If we had come out on the losing side, it would have been our own fault because of our lack of quality when it came to finishing chances,” said Big Sam. “That would have been a very difficult thing to stomach considering the way we played and the amount of chances we created.

“We are happy we have got a point – when you score in the last minute you always feel that way, irrespective of the fact we were the dominant force throughout the game. We dominated the game, created the majority of the chances, yet we were still going into the 91st-minute a goal down.”

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