It’s a period of transition for West Ham and their new manager Slaven Bilic. Still trying to cope with the aftermath of their premature exit from the Europa League competition in Romania the Hammers couldn’t have faced a more difficult task for their first game of the season, away to the mighty Arsenal.
Having sacrificed their best players midweek so they could be available for the game at the Emirates the pressure was on for Bilic’s men as an Europa League exit plus defeat in the first league game wouldn’t have gone down well with the Boleyn Alliance members.
Faced with Arsenal’s sinister, pacy and skillful army of players, Bilic had to dig deep to get anything from the game in order to give new hope and joy to his claret and blue legion of followers and set the Hammers on their way for the final year at their beloved home at the Boleyn.
Well, I had meant to write about something completely different in the first post of my column, but Bilic and our team had something different in mind. How can one not be absolutely delighted with what we’ve seen yesterday ? Where to start ? Fantastic energy levels throughout the team, good chasing, keeping possession of the ball reasonably well, frustrating Arsenal all day long on their own patch – and Arsenal are always difficult to play, even when they have a bad day.
Our goals were clinical and coldly converted as a healthy dog’s nose should be, mercilessly taking advantage of Arsenal weaknesses/blunders. Our defence stood well, we had some good ideas in midfield and even without scoring Sakho again was a livewire. Even Nolan and Maiga looked fresh and willing when they came on.
It was a fantastic team performance and very hard to single out a man of the match. Adrian kept the game level numerous times and more than deserved his clean sheet, Reid was a rock marshalling the defense, Payet will be the heartbeat of our team (hopefully for years to come) and would anyone have guessed that Reece Oxford is 16 years old ? He played as if it was his tenth season at this level already.
Zarate took his chance on the pitch well, he tends to keep the ball for too long, losing it in the process, but his goal took Cech by surprise and pretty much set us up for the win. Zarate will be a useful player for us this season.
We will also have Valencia and Carroll back eventually, Song is likely to come in too plus maybe one or two more players. Once they will find some chemistry I’d expect this lot to be both entertaining to watch and successful in terms of winning games and points.
I just hope that despite the injury to Valencia this will not result in Carroll being rushed back three or four weeks early (again).
Make no mistake: West Ham will lose games under Bilic, also against so-called lesser opposition, he will need some time to get his ideas across to the team, a process that will take some time. But the early signs are promising. I suppose we can put to bed the idea here (without tempting fate) that this West Ham team will have anything to do with relegation at the end of the season. I hope this to be the beginning of a wonderful and exciting journey at the end of which we will move. Which I have done already, moving back into my old flat in Hamburg’s East End with my deceased mom’s house finally being on the market.
So it’s a time for transition and change, both for my club and myself in many different ways. The most important thing I take from our win at Arsenal is a strong belief that Bilic is very capable and a good fit for our club. Given time he could build a proper legacy at West Ham and bring genuine pride back to the East End. Combined with proper unity and passion among our fanbase. It was about time…