Well, this was a bit of an upset for West Ham fans. After beating Arsenal, Crystal Palace, Liverpool and Manchester City all away we then produce a performance as terrible and lazy as that. You must be thinking how?
Desire
The West Ham team has been full of desire and spirit this season, however I’m unsure as to what happened on Saturday. The players didn’t look like they wanted to win or even play for the team. We never really started to be honest. We were in third gear throughout the whole game. The tactics appeared to be ‘lets pass the ball around the back and wait for them to steal it off of us’.
Secondly, you will often see in the best leagues around the world, when a team concedes they will use it as firepower to come back and equalise. The captain and big members of the squad encourage the team and motivate them to push on and do it for the team. On Saturday we had no-one. Mark Noble, James Collins and Adrian to name a few didn’t motivate anybody. We simply didn’t seem to want it.
No-one is worried
I know we lost to newly promoted Watford however there’s no need to worry. We are still 6th in the league and have only lost three. We have a big squad and a confident manager. In Slaven Bilic’s interview after the game he said:
I said to the guys it is unacceptable but we have to make sure it is a one-off. We deserved to be beaten.
Why do we play bad against the ‘weak’ teams and play better against the ‘strong teams’?
I think it might be something to do with complacency. We do the basics against the better teams and don’t overcomplicate anything, however when it comes to the weaker teams we know that we are better than them so individuals do too much, we don’t play as a team. I also think that after the first goal went in we panicked. We weren’t sure what to do with the ball. We played with no sense of urgency or positivity and always seemed to go backwards.
Is Andy Carroll good enough?
Personally I believe he is overrated. Don’t get me wrong on a good day he is fantastic, but he lacks consistency in everything he does. Players with real quality like Dimitri Payet can do the same skill numerous times but with Andy Carroll it’s a ‘hit and hope situation’. He was used to hold up the ball on Saturday and feed it into the wingers, however he didn’t perform as well as Sakho has done in that role and this worries me as he is our record signing.
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