NITE FROM IAIN: The Predictor League for Everton on Wednesday is ready to enter HERE. The deadline for entries is 4pm on Wednesday.
The Bowen therapy, named after an Aussie bloke (Thomas Ambrose Bowen), a self-taught osteopath who invented a special non-invasive bodywork technique, involves stretching the fascia which is the soft tissue that covers all your muscles and organs in order to provide pain relief.
According to its proponents the technique is also proficient when it comes to healing numerous other kinds of ailments: Head- and tootchaches, back pain, sports injuries, apparently it even helps against bedwetting.
No wonder Bowen called it “a gift from God“.
The therapy itself is a very soft form of massage, using very gentle, yet exact rolling movements of the fingers. The applied pressure is as soft as when touching an eyeball without hurting it.
As with many other alternative therapies it has not actually been proven conclusively if the method is efficient (or even works) or if it’s more like an expensive placebo.
At West Ham, in the game against Wolves yesterday evening, the Bowen therapy involved Englishman Jarrod Bowen making precise and lethal runs into the box, being highly invasive by scoring twice, providing a painful headache for the opposition all game long, gently helping West Ham to a wonderful 4:0 drubbing of one of the better teams in the Premier League, relieving our club of the stinging pain of having no points on the board so far this season.
Bowen was very much working a treat against Wolves, so has to be considered as being a welcome remedy, not a mere placebo for the Hammers on the night. I’m sure West Ham fans everywhere feel a lot better already this morning, thanks to the Bowen technique…
If you do get your first league win of the season against all the odds, you might as well do it in style!
Winning 4:0 against a side like Wolverhampton is only possible with a complete team performance and it very much was one of those.
I have to hold my hands up and say: When I saw our lineup before the game I was slightly perturbed, feeling that Moyes must be suffering rather severe symptoms of Covid-19 adversely affecting his tactical thinking.
But what do I know…;-))
Moyes had the formation and the application levels of the eleven starters spot on – Wolves looked very ordinary, almost shell-shocked at what we threw at them for 95 minutes.
Our first crucial goal came courtesy of something very un-West Ham-like: Awareness of a game situation and exploiting it as quick as a rat might escape up a drainpipe.
With a freekick given to West Ham at the halfway line after a rugby tackle against Antonio, the brilliant Pablo Fornals saw Bowen sprint into action and immediately played a neat ball into his path out on the right while the Wolves players were still trying to have a chinwag with the ref about something. Maybe to do with a horse. Or the spot where the freekick should be taken from.
Bowen, cool as a cucumber, struck the ball oh so sweetly into the far corner to score the first goal of the game which was always going to make a massive difference.
In the first half we did create plenty of other opportunities, but were rather wasteful with some of them (yes, I’m looking at you, Mr. Antonio and Mr. Fornals!), but somehow we kept scoring in the second half.
And so the confidence and swagger kept building for West Ham, on and on and on, with every successful pass, move and tackle. If you want to get the best out of players like Fredericks, Cresswell and Masuaku, play them like this. They even put in some tantalisingly dangerous crosses into the box.
Fantastic!
When Fredericks pulled up shortly after the restart, we could have missed a beat with young Ben Johnson coming on in an unwanted switch of personnel, but we just didn’t. After some initial nervous play, Johnson found his feet and did his job as part of a well drilled Hammers team.
Special kudos to Balbuena who was excellent. As a pure defender with an experienced head I like him a lot. He may not be worth £35m, but I would gladly see him start again regularly for us.
As for Fredericks hopefully he won’t be out for too long. In the meantime I trust Johnson to grow even more into the RB (or wing back) role in the coming weeks. Soucek and Haller added two great headed goals to round off a wonderful evening in a game where no West Ham player had a stinker.
I know they ruled our third as an own goal by the Wolverine striker, but I’m not having that – glorious goal by Sous Chef! ;-)
The entire team was working incredibly hard for each other on the night, but also for the gaffer stuck in isolation, surely also for the fans watching at home all over the world. It was simply a very impressive performance, there’s no denying that.
We looked like a team where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts and that must be down to the coaching staff.
I think the Wolves game showed that a lot of work must have been done on the training ground in the last few days to get a performance like that out of the lads. That didn’t look like luck or a happy accident. That looked like the fruits of guts, sweat and tears down Rush Green.
We obviously have a lot of nightmare fixtures coming up, but if the effort and application of our players remains at a similar level from now on, well, then we are unlikely to come out of the next four or five games with zero points. We can play some bloody decent (and winning) football after all.
We can even keep a clean sheet. And that bodes well.
Let me say a bit about the transfer window now. (Tin hat on!)
I get the message that we don’t have much money for signings, despite already selling the likes of Hugill, Ajeti and Diangana. We also let players like Sanchez, Zabaleta and Roberto go, saving quite a bit of wages that way. So I do appreciate that we won’t be seeing a massive influx of new arrivals at West Ham in the coming days.
On the other hand I don’t consider us skint to a degree that we HAVE to sell Rice this window. We don’t. We shouldn’t. A good owner wouldn’t.
I would also expect our chairman to act like a professional club would by not weakening our squad any further than he did already by selling all those players I mentioned.
Letting Declan Rice go now, on top of the others, cheap or otherwise, would render our team weaker, more vulnerable, more likely to end up in another relegation battle. I haven’t yet seen a clear statement from Rice that he wants out this window by hook or by crook.
I don’t begrudge Declan a move to a bigger club eventually, in order to enjoy regular Champions League football and the sweet whiff of actually winning a trophy occasionally.
But Declan is still very young, there is plenty of time for him to experience all that and as we are still in a deflated transfer market due to the pandemic, what we are likely to get for him this window in terms of a transfer fee would in no way reflect his value to our team and this club as a whole. I don’t give a hoot how small a bid Chelsea may think they can get away with submitting for him just because he did support them as a kid.
Or because his mate Mason Mount is playing for them.
That’s all very touching, but I want what’s best for West Ham, not what might suit Roman Abramovich, Frank Lampard or Mason Mount!
Screw them, with bells on!
If Rice were to stay for one more year, developing further at West Ham, taking on the captain’s armband while also playing for England regularly, his value will shoot up even more and should things improve in terms of the pandemic one year from now, West Ham could add another 25-30m to the asking price, if we can keep him just a bit longer and don’t go for the quick end of window transfer cash injection from Chelsea. It’d be easy money, granted, but there’s no way we could find a halfway decent replacement now.
In my book, selling Rice now would represent bad business, terrible timing and weak custodianship of the club.
If Rice is reading this, I would hope he knows exactly how much us fans would love him to stay and that we would immensely appreciate if he stuck around even if it’s for just one more season – for the benefit of our club and his own development as well. Time surely is very much on Rice’s side.
There have been other players before him, young prospects with sky-high ceilings who made that move to a bigger club just that little bit too early maybe.
Timing sometimes is everything. Personally, I think the timing isn’t quite right (yet) for Rice to leave. West Ham is good for him for another season or two. And if he doesn’t believe me, he should ask his midfield partner Soucek. That might help…
But maybe that’s just wishful thinking on my part.
As for our transfer business, considering our financial state, I’d be perfectly happy making 1-2 loan signings (FB and CB), keep Rice and be done with it. Is that going to happen ? Probably not. But one can hope. COYI!!!
Hamburg football update: Starting with St.Pauli who surprisingly won in style against a very decent team (Heidenheim) by a scoreline of 4:2 at home, in front of 2.226 cheerful fans inside the stadium. Don’t ask me about the odd figure, apparently that’s the exact number of supporters who were allowed to watch by the local authorities, must be a percentage of the full capacity I guess. The Kiezkicker are in a very impressive second place in the table, with 4 points after the first two games.
Their rivals Hamburg SV can overtake them with an away win at Paderborn later this evening, live on BT Sport 2 at 7:30pm. Paderborn have just been relegated from Bundesliga 1 this summer.
Concordia’s first team didn’t play. Their away game was called off due to an opposition player having tested positive for Covid-19.
The U23s started their season in style with a 4:1 home win while the women’s team suffered a first league defeat in their debut performance at the highest local amateur level, a 0:4 thrashing which is likely to be merely the first of a few more footballing lessons the girls will have to take on board this season.
After three consecutive promotions they are now at a level where ALL the other teams, at least on paper, are stronger than Concordia. No more 6:1 wins this season, I’m afraid…all part of the learning curve.