OPINION
West Ham are clearly on the hunt to find a goalkeeper who will stop the club having issues between the sticks next season yet they haven’t turned to Liverpool’s Simon Mignolet yet.
According to the Daily Mail, the Hammers are exploring their options when it comes to recruiting a new goalkeeper but have already made enquires about Jack Butland.
While the Stoke City goalkeeper’s suitability when it comes to being the Hammers’ new No.1 can be debated it seems odd that the club haven’t been outed as making at least enquires about Mignolet.
The 30-year-old, who TotalSportek state earns £60,000-a-week at Anfield, has bucket loads of Premier League experience and is a keeper who has wrongly been over-criticised in recent seasons.
Mignolet may have made some high-profile blunders at the Reds but when you consider he has made over 202 appearances for the Merseyside giants, they’re glitches in comparison to how often he regularly delivered the goods.
The experienced goalkeeper also excelled when at Sunderland, he played 101 times for them, and had everyone convinced that he was worthy of playing for a top-six side in the Premier League, hence why the Reds ended up with him.
While the pressure cooker at Anfield has made Mignolet’s task to succeed near impossible, it doesn’t mean he’s a bad keeper, who wouldn’t solve the Hammers problems in goal.
The Reds goalkeeper is clearly destined to leave his current side in this window, even if he played down speculation about his future to the Daily Mirror recently, as he no longer regular features for the club.
Mignolet finished his 2017/18 campaign having featured 22 times for Jurgen Klopp’s team but lost his status as a guaranteed stater due to the emergence of Loris Karius.
Therefore with the 30-year-old clearly proving himself in the Premier League in the past, the Hammers are missing a trick in their reported hunt to solve the problem position of goalkeeper, as the current £60,000-a-week Reds player is the answer to their prayers.
