Guest Post by Andy Larkin
How many really convincing victories have we had this season ? In the old days, although we were very inconsistent, West Ham sides always a few 3-0 or 4-0 victories every year. Not this season, and this has been our best year for ages. We struggled to beat a 10 man Aston Villa at home, scraped home against Sunderland, and the other day only just beat Watford’s reserves with the help of two overdue penalties. Now don’t get me wrong, the performance against Watford was great, we made loads of chances but squandered so many. If Adrian hadn’t saved that late penalty it would only have been a 1 goal win, when it should have been by 4 or 5.
Everyone is rightly talking about the fact that West Ham have drawn so many games this season. Most of those games have been games in which we have been the better team, and should have won. Just take a glance at this season’s results. So many times 3 potential points have returned only 1. Many of these were home games, earlier in the season to Norwich, West Brom, Man City and Everton then latterly to the likes of Palace. Then of course there were the referee mistakes away at Villa, Chelsea and Leicester.
For me the root cause of all this have been our lack of a regular goalscorer. Just think what a difference a really regular goalscorer would have made in those games. Our goals have been shared around the team. Dimitri really shouldn’t be our top scorer. OK, Sackho and Valencia have had various injuries but I think the time has come to look to replace them. Emenike doesn’t look the man to do that, despite the fact that he works hard and Bilic clearly likes him. Big Andy is terrific, but will never be a 20 goal a season man. Much talk about Oxlade-Chamberlain or even Walcott coming in from Arsenal, but the man I would prefer would be Olivier Giroud. Arsenal will probably break the bank to bring in Benzema or someone similar, which may well make Giroud available.
So my message to the board is, give Bilic the funds to sign a top class goal scorer and we can really start to think of ourselves as Champions League contenders.
COMMENT FROM IAIN: Giroud? Seriously?!!!