The clean sheets keep on coming

The recent clash between Norwich City and West Ham united ended as a draw, with each team failing to break the deadlock and take the upper hand despite an open and attacking approach taken by both sides.

The build-up to the meeting favoured Norwich City to come out on top, after their respectable performances in their past two matches of the season, most notably against Tottenham Hotspur. However, the fact that we were made underdogs angered me slightly because although our away form needs some work after Swansea City made a mugging of us, we have shown we can play football and we have a lot more class in our squad than Norwich (no offence) despite that, it is how the team plays on the day as a unit and fair play to Norwich they played some good football and I think they deserved a win and are unlucky to only get a point from today.

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It was very frustrating watching us perform in the first half, we never really seemed to get going defensively and in the attacking third. At the heart of our defence, I was constantly panicking when James Collins got on the ball, I am such a fan of the bloke, however he needs work on his game when he has the ball at his feet, as for in the air he was dominating as always. His defensive partner Winston Reid didn’t really put a foot wrong and was ok, however the full backs both had poor games as they both failed to make an impact creating the wide options and defensively lost the ball on more than a few occasions, as for Guy Demel’s passing don’t get me started.

When you think of the so called “West Ham way” you think on the floor passing and movement, however I can only recall 2 times in the whole match where this actually happened and almost paid off, as most of the time the ball would be lost in the middle of the pitch or the cutting edge pass just wasn’t accurate enough, it was hard to watch at times and I would hate to see our pass success rate in the game.

Norwich had some players who were really up for it today and I felt that Leon Barnett and Sebastian Bassong were solid all game, keeping Carlton Cole quiet and always seeming one step ahead of him, also the likes of Grant Holt and Robert Snodgrass were a constant thorn in our side.

In all fairness although we didn’t play good, we didn’t play too bad to say it’s the worst I’ve seen us play as there are some real positives to take from the game.

A couple of players played really well in my opinion, such as Mohamed Diame; who’s forward runs and power driving forward looked like our only outlet in the first half. But I was very impressed today by Jussi Jaaskelainen who was very reliable, his saves were what kept us in the game in the end most recognisably his save to deny Simeon Jackson’s blistering shot and without him today we could have crumbled as they dominated with the amount of attempts on goal in comparison to our poor attempt to even get half of their shots on goal.

In the second half I felt we looked a little better going forward, especially when the substitutions were made, bringing on Modibo Maiga and Matthew Jarvis, with the latter showing how to cross a ball every time he had the chance to.

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The problem with our performance is that you can clearly see we lack that flair in the final third, whether it is having that person who can cut open a defence or a striker who can make something happen out of nothing. We had to adapt our play slightly today and that unsettled the players a little bit and not having the big man Andy Carroll up top you could clearly see the players well left defending most of the game as Cole just couldn’t win and hold the ball up long enough.

Despite us failing to win the game and hit the back of the net, we have managed to get a draw against a good attacking side and that is something we should be happy about, taking our performance into account and it’s another point in the bag helping us stay in 7 th place in the table when many felt we would struggle to fight in the relegation battle.

We will need to brush this game off and look towards the next game now, as a team like Newcastle United are going to play some attractive football and they have a team full of flair, the fans need to keep getting behind the team like we are and help drive them on.

COYI!

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