OPINION
West Ham haven’t won any of their last seven games and manager Manuel Pellegrini is certainly under pressure as a result.
However former Premier League chairman Simon Jordan implied one West Ham player is effectively saving Pellegrini’s job as it stands by being his get out jail free card, with the player in question being none other than goalkeeper Roberto.
“I think Pellegrini has got a get out of jail free card as he has a keeper who can’t catch a cold,” said Jordan on talkSPORT, in a clip uploaded to the station’s Twitter account.
“And from that point of view, he has an element of avoidable over what is going on.”
While some may claim Roberto is the cause of Pellegrini’s pressure as him struggling between the sticks has coincided with the Hammers sliding down the table, Jordan is spot-on.
Due to Roberto being so bad, he gets a lot of the blame for the Hammers’ poor run of form and that covers up any other problems on the pitch which can be attributed to Pellegrini.
The 33-year-old shot-stopper has conceded 15 goals in seven Premier League outings and has failed to keep a clean sheet.
Roberto has been so bad that not only did he manage to score an own goal in the loss to Burnley by effectively hitting it into his own net, but he’s been so shocking that Chris Sutton argued that he could be one of the worse keepers to ever grace the Premier League in his Daily Mail column.
So with that in mind, there is an unspoken belief that potentially once Pellegrini can call on a better goalkeeper than Roberto, results may improve.
While this may not actually be the case, it does make it a risk to sack him if the only thing that has caused the Hammers’ form to dip is an unhelped personnel issue.