I am as guilty as most of being glass half empty but this is a realistic and refreshing piece about West Ham for a change.
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West Ham now have everything but the goal…
“They had one chance in the first half, they scored and then defended very well…but in the second 45 minutes we had the pace, we had the football, they didn’t have many chances in our box but in this game, you need to score.”
“They created one chance and they scored. We had a couple and didn’t. In the second 45 minutes there was just one team in the game, us. We dominated, had the possession, created chances, played most of the game in their third but in this game you must score. If you don’t then it is difficult to win.”
The same manager, the same result and then practically the same verdict after two different games for West Ham, who have recorded back-to-back 1-0 defeats in the Premier League for the first time in over four years. A 1-0 defeat is surely the least West Ham of all scorelines; for context, they did not lose a single game by that scoreline last season as they contrived to concede as many goals as the relegated Stoke and many more than everybody else. They won enough games to stave off relegation but when they lost, they really lost; their last defeats under David Moyes saw them crash 4-1, 4-1, 3-0, 4-1, 4-1 and 3-1.
The Hammers began this season in a similar vein but they are fast becoming the least West Ham of all West Ham teams. Two seasons ago they ranked lowest in the Premier League for tackles; this season they have made the most. Manuel Pellegrini has made them meaner and – in the case of Robert Snodgrass, at least – considerably leaner. They are now a serious proposition, with the only punchline for this previously joke team being that they cannot score the goals their football deserves.
Of the XI that should have claimed at least a point against Tottenham last week, only four were regulars last season. A new defensive spine running from Lukasz Fabianski through to Declan Rice at the base of the midfield has made the Hammers increasingly hard to breach. Over the last six games, they have conceded an impressively low five goals. They have not been this defensively sound for almost three years, when Slaven Bilic delivered a now barely believable seventh-place finish above both Liverpool and Chelsea.
As Peter Goldstein wrote this week of Issa Diop: ‘The Frenchman is forming a very useful partnership with Fabián Balbuena, and with Declan Rice settling in at the holding role, West Ham are finally starting to keep the scores down.’
“We are improving, yes,” said Pellegrini this week. “But we didn’t score goals, so something is missing.” It’s a pretty big ‘but’ but Pellegrini is the type of manager who would rather be losing games 1-0 than 4-3. Especially when those two 1-0 defeats featured 30 West Ham goal attempts. While their aim was far from true against Brighton, they were repeatedly thwarted by Hugo Lloris last week against Spurs. Marko Arnautovic hit the target with four of his five shots; if he had faced Eindhoven Lloris rather than London Lloris they would have emerged with at least a point.
This weekend they travel to Leicester at the start of a kinder run of fixtures after they faced five of last season’s top six in their first nine games. Serious injury to Andriy Yarmolenko has been a blow, but the emergence of Academy graduate Grady Diangana as an alternative is a welcome by-product of Pellegrini’s determination to bring West Ham’s Under-23s closer to the first team both geographically and in terms of opportunity.
Finally, there are positives at West Ham. There are young players. There is bite. There is defensive meanness. There is flair allied with work ethic. All that is now missing is the goals.
