In his BBC Sport column, Robbie Savage has praised West Ham’s turnaround in results and playing style under Sam Allardyce this season,
“When I spoke about West Ham on Match of the Day after they beat Crystal Palace at the end of August, I said how impressed I was with the way they were playing.
Then the Hammers lost to Southampton the following week and quite a few people tried to tell me that I was wrong about them. Since then, however, I continued to stick up for them because they did look a different team. Their recent results are certainly backing that up and they will be full of confidence when they play Manchester City on Saturday. The Hammers are up in fourth place in the table, and it is hard to find the West Ham fans who were criticising their manager Sam Allardyce, and were so determined to get rid of him last season. Allardyce has not just drastically improved results, he has done so by using the more attractive and attacking playing style that the club’s owners asked for over the summer. Not only that, but he has been able to bed in a number of new players at the same time, something the likes of Liverpool and Tottenham, to name just two teams, have struggled to do successfully in recent months.The statistics show the progress that West Ham have made in the last few months – this season they have more goals and shots on target per game, and are also playing more passes more accurately with fewer long balls.”