Did you ever think that you’d be sitting here in January contemplating the possibility that you may be looking at the best ever Premier League Hammers squad? Can we achieve our greatest ever league finish? Do we have the right players? Looking back at 18-and-a-half seasons in the league there have been plenty of top class players donning the claret and blue shirt such as Tony Cottee, Carlos Tevez and Scott Parker. However, none of these players featured in the Hammers two most successful Premier League campaigns so far: 1998/99 where we finished 5th and 2001/02 finishing 7th. So let’s take a trip down memory lane and have a look at those squads to compare the key ingredients that contributed to those successes with our current crop of Irons achievers starting with the goalkeepers and defenders. I have picked out the players that I think sit on top of the pile in this epic battle of successful West Ham performers but you can make up your own mind – Players that have been selected are the ones that made the most appearances in the Premier League that season in their respective position.
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West Ham’s style of play now seems to need to revert back to what it was before we made all of these great new signings. I mean why sign them if all along Sam stubbornly refuses to drop an AC, who only gets a goal once in a blue moon? I don’t blame Zarate for going out on loan as he was a waste under Sam, but not Harry though, no Harry has more sense and he’ll play Zarate. I mean with the apple cart now upset with this AC inclusion that Sam stubbornly refuses to shift from and the strike force dried up, it now seems like the thing to do at Swansea, is to play for a draw, shut up shop and hope to snatch a goal and come away with a 1-0 win. If we can finally get our 1st clean sheet again since I forget how many games ago, 6 games back I think and bottom club LEICESTER wasn’t it? Then we can start to get back up the table again. I mean Swansea are averaging 1.5 goals per game at home and have only let in 7 in 10 home games. We just have to stop Bony from scoring; it’s as simple as that. After the way we have opened our account this season, it is an absolute insult to have Spurs & Arsenal sneak past us. We want our 4th spot back, now go out and blasted well get it back West Ham as we do have a better team than Southampton, and realistically, at this present moment, it is only the top 3 who appear to have better teams than West Ham, so go out and prove it West Ham, and for many of us who have been Hammers fans for decades, we need to keep telling Sam, hey this is our club and has been for some of us since the East India docks were around and we have waited decades to have a squad like this, now bleeding well use it. COYI!
Even though Carroll scored a lovely goal there were chance missed by West Ham that if taken would have seen us comfortably win that game and in fact AC is so used to being the “main man” that he put people off of goal attempts that were not his balls and got in the way of a Nolan shot at goal and seemed to put James Collins of a dead certain goal by jumping in front of James, when Collins who is usually deadly in front of goal with his head had it covered. No, had it gone to 2-0 we could have defended that lead, but 1-0? Is always a gamble and in the end we were fortunate to come away with a point and I don’t know that replacing Valencia with Amalfitano made any difference anyway. We needed a2nd goal so I would have left this striker, that has no trouble scoring at international level, on, but I definitely would have given Nolan less playing time. We were really missing players with the quality that Song, Kouyate, Sakho and even (Zarate who is now needed after being loaned out) could have provided. West Ham did play an awesome game, but there is still this missing ingredient of strike force, which is proved with us only being able to net no more than one goal as of late.