Everton. It is the one West Ham fixture that I actually dread watching every season, whether it be home or away, rain or shine. I only really have bad memories of games against the Merseysiders over the years, aside from some (very) rare exceptions.
It seems to matter not what the respective form of the two sides are in the build-up to the match, nor how well West Ham play on the day; Everton almost invariably find a way of winning – often in the most frustrating of circumstances.
Take last season for instance, when the Hammers held a 2-1 lead going into the final few minutes of the contest at Upton Park. Mark Noble was then sent off and two goals subsequently conceded to hand Everton a 3-2 victory. This match also included two wonder free-kicks from Leighton Baines – absolutely typical.
Or the year before that when Carlton Cole was inexplicably given a straight red card for a high boot in a fixture that West Ham would lose 2-1. This was another match in which the Hammers had held the lead deep into the contest.
However, my worst experience of watching West Ham play Everton has to be six seasons ago, in 2008. Managed then by Gianfranco Zola, the Hammers completely dominated the game, and had a 1-0 lead to show for their efforts, courtesy of a brilliant strike by a young Jack Collison. But approaching the end of the 90 minutes, Joleon Lescott scored an equaliser out of nowhere, and that goal was swiftly followed by two further sucker punches by Louis Saha, who had a habit of scoring against the Hammers over the years. To play so well for most of the match only to lose in a few minutes of madness was unbearable, but sadly not untypical of West Ham v Everton fixtures.
And those games that I have described have merely been the few that have stuck in my mind the most amidst all the bad results and general misery we have suffered at the hands of Everton over the years.
The stats bear out this negative assessment, too. In the Premier League era West Ham and Everton have played one another on 36 occasions. Everton have emerged victorious in 20 of those matches, whilst the Hammers have got the better of the Merseysiders just six times in the same period of time.
Included in this horrific record have been some humiliating scorelines too. There has been a 3-0, a 4-0, a 5-0 and even a 6-0 reverse at the hands of the Toffees, who have truly been a sticky proposition for West Ham (sorry – couldn’t resist that one).
This is all against a side who, whilst generally able to finish above West Ham, especially during the last decade or so, in all honesty haven’t been anything special during the Premier League era, which makes it even worse. You could probably stomach such statistics against Manchester United for example. Indeed Everton were even fighting relegation battles in the early years of the rebranded top division of English football.
History is therefore not on West Ham’s side when the two sides meet on Saturday afternoon at Goodison Park. The Irons have been in better form than their hosts this season – sitting four points ahead of them in the table. Yet as we know form has rarely counted for anything when it comes to this particular fixture over the years.
This is a new look West Ham however, and perhaps this is the time for Sam Allardyce’s men to buck the trend. Unfortunately I just cannot bring myself to believe that. I’m not sure what it is, but there is something about Everton. They really are the archetypal ‘bogey team’ for West Ham.
