Things seemed good at the end of 2014 for West Ham. Very good; suspiciously good, actually. After all, it had been a while since West Ham United had made any particularly “West Ham” errors. Then 2015 rolled along – and since we’ve welcomed in the New Year, we’ve elected to return to a show of the most frustrating, mind-numbingly tedious West Ham United ‘specialties’ imaginable.
In just a few short weeks we managed to lose our sponsor – leading to some rather fetching white blocks ironed over our shirts for our new sponsor – got a fine for fielding our own player in an FA Cup match; we’ve run out of available centre-backs, we’ve tried and failed to sign our own player back on loan from QPR, lost a key player to a red card, announced a season-ending injury to Andy Carroll, and we ended a transfer window by doing nothing other than desperately pulling Carlton Cole back to Upton Park.
I’m sorry; did we learn nothing from last year – in fact, what year is this anyway?
Were we getting worried about getting too far away from the West Ham United we know and love? Did we need to do a little self-sabotage to make sure everyone remembered just what the West Ham way was?
After all – we really only have ourselves to blame for most of the situations we’ve gotten ourselves in. We should have done more to try to bring in centre-back cover in January, we should never have risked Andy Carroll against Southampton, and while I maintain we were not wrong to play Diafra Sakho in the FA Cup, you just never know what the FA are going to throw at you – you cannot trust that organisation to do the right thing on every occasion, and the risk level was real.
Despite the unwelcome throwbacks, it’s not all doom and gloom for the irons. Where we do differ from last year is down to how we’ve reacted to our internal disasters. West Ham United have managed to get a new shirt sponsor within days of losing the old one, rather than have extra front shirt numbers for the rest of the season. We didn’t get chucked out of the FA Cup, and even given the fine we have to pay for fielding Sakho, we’ve still turned a £19,000 profit from the prize money.
Cheikhou Kouyate has stepped in as an OUSTANDING centre-back, we somehow managed to get Adrian San Miguel’s red card ban overturned (surprising, given what we went through with Andy Carroll in the previous season), and although Carroll’s injury is devastating for the player, Sakho and Enner Valencia have proved to be extremely valuable acquisitions for the Hammers, and I am confident they will provide us with goals.
Even given the struggles, we are also still – slowly – fighting to stay in the top half of the table. At the time of writing, we have only lost twice in our last ten games, and whilst the FA Cup exit was an awful event for everyone concerned, we got much further this year than we did last year. The point against high-flying Southampton, where we only had nine men available for the majority of the second half, was a defensive triumph for us.
The heart and commitment showed by the players that night was incredible to see – and provided we harness that spirit, and not the lack there of that we saw against West Brom, we can return to making the West Ham way a winning one.
