It’s official. Our worse start in the Premier League for over a decade. With cataclysmic defending one end and an absolute no show at the other end, we are in dire straits. No one seems to be working together, communication is non-existent and no player has turned up this year apart from Michail Antonio.
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I feel, to really turn this around, is to give a wake-up call to the squad. Make wholesale changes and bring some youthful exuberance into the team. If you’re not up to scratch that’s fine, a Pep Guardiola-esque ruthlessness approach and take these under-achievers and sit them on the bench. Noble is our captain, he is under-performing like the rest of them but you cannot drop him; I find it bewildering to see people calling for his head knowing how much of a force he is in the dressing room.
It’s not all down to Noble, though. Slaven Bilic’s tactical/team decisions have been questionable thus far, which is in stark contrast to last year. Playing a defensive midfielder at right back when we have two capable ones is a strange move. What is stranger is the fact that Reece Oxford hasn’t had a minute of football all of last week?
I thought not seeing him in the squad for the Accrington Stanley game, we were finally going to see him play in the team in the Premier League. It’s an odd move, especially seeing as pretty much all the top clubs are after him in the Premier League and we’ve loaned out every other promising youngster to the lower leagues – we even (wrongly) sold James Tomkins to free up some space at the back. As a player who was ear-marked for first-team football this season, Oxford has got to be sitting there thinking about what his next move is.
A lot of the frustration is down to seeing that the players aren’t giving it enough effort. We’ve got Diafra Sakho off robbing a living at the moment and we have Gokhan Tore not living up to the hype despite coming in with rave reviews from Bilic. Just like Emmanuel Emenike did before him.
There’s got to be something going on behind the scenes, maybe the sale of Tomkins has shaken Noble up a little bit? Maybe seeing the attitude of Sakho has thrown some players off? These are things we’re not going to realistically ever find out so we must do all we can to overcome this horrible dip in West Ham’s recent history.
We need to get back to the West Ham Way. This is to everybody that has something to do with West Ham. Our mantra of playing young, English players needs to be upheld in the game against Middlesborough this weekend. Starts for Ashley Fletcher and Oxford need to happen, I believe. We truly do not have anything else to lose at this point.
Also the fans, we’re universally known for taking the absolute mickey, even at ourselves! I know it sounds absolutely incredulous to say at this point given everything that is going on but maybe we need to get back to that. Singing until our vocal chords can’t take it anymore, getting that unity back into the walk up to the stadium, at the moment it is just soulless.
I know there’s nothing to sing about, but we need that ferocity back, I can’t be the only one that feels sick with the current goings-on at the club and I think we’ve got to get back to the old ways of not giving a monkey’s and having a good laugh at it all. That’s what West Ham’s really about.
So come on, let’s get behind the team and be that 12th man again, that driving force, that intimidating influence. We’re too good not to be able to turn this around, we just need a nudge in the right direction!
