FIVE Positives From West Ham’s Season So Far

The 2012-13 Barclays Premier League season has been a bit of a strange one for West Ham United, with their away form going from record breaking last season and the home record going and the home record being our main points earner.

 

West Ham supporters will be relatively familiar with what most teams would think of as weird seasons because down the years we have had so many. In every season for West Ham there are positives and negatives and at a time when there seems to be a lot of doom and gloom surrounding West Ham, I’m going to look at the positives of this season so far.

 

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First of all I think that our current position in the league is a good one, yes we are only seven points off of relegation with that Aston Villa loss, but we are not that far away from any teams above us. We’re in 11^th place and only three points away from 10^th, and I’m sure that if West Ham supporters had been offered this at the beginning of the season, the majority would have grabbed it with both hands. When you consider that we are a newly promoted side, looking to re-establish ourselves in the Premier League I think that we are doing well and if we pick our form up again, then we can look to push on, and we are doing a much better job than the other promoted teams.

 

Another positive is that we seem to be showing a lot of ambition in terms of players, both keeping players from last year and building on the squad, which is leaving us with a squad that I think looks very good. Keeping hold of Mohamed Diame in the recent window, shows that we are looking to push on, rather than sell our assets like we may have done years ago, and with ambitious signings such as Andy Carroll, we have seen that the chairmen are looking to make West Ham a force to be reckoned with, and we have made a good start, as when we are on form, we are almost unbeatable.

 

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One thing that I think of as a real big positive is that we have been challenging the “bigger teams” whenever we have played them, especially at home. The game against Chelsea, which we won 3-0 comes to mind as that is a day that I won’t be forgetting for a long time. We also held Manchester United at home in the FA Cup (almost beating them) along with Manchester City in the league. Not many teams around mid-table or below, have as good a record against teams in the top four and whenever we have played them we have given them a hard game, and haven’t been badly turned over by any of them yet this season.

 

Our home form has been a big factor for our success so far, if you want to be a success in the Premier League, you have to be able to get points at home and we have been fairly good at that this season, we have had some great results at home, beating Southampton 4-0 in what was a bit of a six pointer at the time, and we also show confidence at home, beating Swansea 1-0 recently and when we drew 1-1 against Sunderland we showed desire throughout the whole game and it paid off in the final minutes with that Nolan goal. If we keep our home performances going then I’m sure that we will be alright, and then maybe we can start to improve the away form.

 

The last positive that I will mention, is that most of the players from last season’s promotion campaign have really stepped up since we joined the Premier League and have been key players for us. Ricardo Vaz Te and Carlton Cole have been criticised for the way that they have adapted to Premier League football, but players like Winston Reid, Guy Demel and Joey O’Brien, I think that they look better now than they did in the Championship, and they have all been key members of a defence which has looked very good in recent times, and Mark Noble and Kevin Nolan are also forever present players in the midfield.

 

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I would say that so far this has been a good season for West Ham, and with positive things like our league position, ambition, our performances against big teams, our home record and players from last years’ Championship push adapting to the Premier League, I think that West Ham supporters have a lot of reasons to be happy.