West Ham’s recruitment search is in full flow and with the season underway after last night’s 3-0 victory over Lusitans, some fans will be slightly anxious that some key positions are in need of strengthening.
The position most in need of improvement is our striking options. Currently our strikers are Andy Carroll, Diafra Sakho, Enner Valencia and Modibo Maiga, with some people arguing that Zarate could join this list but for me he is more suited to playing behind the striker.
My main concern regarding these players is their injuries and lack of consistency. Andy Carroll is probably the most injury-prone striker in the league and as our record signing this is very concerning. Clearly, injuries are not his fault but it is problematic when he is not available for large parts of seasons. This means that the burden of scoring goals falls to last season’s signings Diafra Sakho and Enner Valencia.
Valencia really failed to live up to his price tag despite glimpses of quality last year and although he didn’t pick up many injuries apart from the mug-related incident, he was unable to lead the attack when other options were injured.
Diafra Sakho was our best striker last season scoring 12 goals. However, his record of seven in his first seven starts and then five throughout the rest of the campaign was unfortunately plagued by a reoccurring lower back injury. Modibo Maiga has never been a player that we all want to pay to watch play for West Ham so he is probably going to be considered as a back-up option.
Valencia and Sakho did form a good partnership in the first half of the campaign and I think two quick strikers with a creative midfield behind it is what I consider entertaining football that is certainly the closest to the so called ‘West Ham way’. However, Bilic is known to play a 4-2-3-1 formation that he made fairly successful at Besiktas so perhaps we need to find strikers to fit that formation.
With our seemingly large transfer budget for this summer I would have liked to see Loic Remy join the club but recently Jose Mourinho has issued a ‘hands off warning’ to clubs interested in the £15million rated Frenchmen. Remy perhaps would not have been the best option to play up front alone and although he has done so at Chelsea I don’t see him having the same success as a lone striker at West Ham.
A striker in the mould of Charlie Austin is probably the way to go in the formation with one striker but QPR seem to be pricing Austin out of a move so perhaps we should look elsewhere.
Admittedly it is quite difficult to identify targets who can walk into our first team as teams rarely want to sell top quality strikers but with the scouting team that found Kouyate and Sakho for very reasonable prices I am confident they, the board and the manager will find and sign the right players, in all positions.
Who would you want to see leading the line in our last season at Upton Park? Do we need any other strikers? Should we offload any?
Definitly offload Maiga. Try to get a £12m + performance based £3m for Austin and I say GO for it. Other than that I would more like to see a new central defender with high quality.
I think the fella from afc Wimbledon agyue would suit us he’s training with us so give a a pun……