Saturday’s game against Watford was probably the strangest West Ham game I’ve ever been to. I have never felt so disconnected with the club that I love, the anger wasn’t so raw and the disappointment not so heavy, I just accepted it and moved straight on. That’s not really what it is to be a football fan. Maybe it’s sitting so far away or the new surroundings or just the fact that the moments of completely incompetent defending has now stretched from the Swansea game near the end of last season all the way through to now. All I can say is that I hope things change soon.
I must say that up until minute 35 some of the football we played was simply magnificent. The link-up between Payet, Lanzini, Zaza and Antonio was beautiful to watch and at times they looked like an unstoppable force. Zaza started quickly and wanted to be involved in all of our attacks, his movement being important for the second and he was the player that won the corner for the first. Payet showed moments of pure class; we’ve done extremely well to keep hold of him. Lanzini wasn’t at his storming best but him and Payet have a brilliant understanding and that helps with every move we put together and Antonio was the only player who you can say was brilliant for 90 minutes. In scoring, running his socks off and apologising for the shambolic defending afterwards, he is proving himself to be a wonderful football player and person.
So at minute 35 after recovering from the shock of seeing a West Ham player do a rabona cross and watch another West Ham player nod it in at the back post, I sat back in my seat, stretched my legs out in these new spacious seats and relaxed. I think everyone did, we were absolutely cruising. There had been some nervous moments at the back but if we continued playing like we were then we surely could even outscore Watford if we had to. Well, I hadn’t included in that simple understanding of the situation that 10 of our players would relax just as much as me… But within 6 minutes at the end of the first half, I had certainly woken up to it. I was shocked to see the complete lack of effort that surrounded the two goals as our team cruised around the pitch, looking like the game was already done and to be honest, it’s to Watford’s credit that they used that to their advantage by pressing onto us and scoring two quick goals.
I could put the statistical league table here and talk about how the stats back up some tactical analysis and do what I do every other week but this week there is honestly no point in that. The stats are meaningless, we were so bad from those moments onwards that even the top performances in the statistical categories that I use in my algorithm are shoddy at best. Collins, who was absolutely awful in the game managed to pick up three of those additional top performance points but the algorithm does somewhat do the job correctly by penalising him for his mistakes and reducing his total game score to 1. Anyway, it shows the fragility of statistics as a method of analysis and how they can only be used where appropriate to back up proper football analysis.
So my statistical analysis for the week is this: Antonio scored 2 goals and thus gained 8 points in the player table, he was our main threat for the entire game and when we were chasing the game at 4-2, Bilic made a decision that I just cannot understand. He took Byram off and brought on Tore, who has been poor at best. Who filled in at right back? None other than our main goal threat and joint Premier League top scorer Michail Antonio. Explain that one please…
Here’s the cumulative table after the Man City and Watford game points have been added:
Antonio: 21.5
Collins: 16.5
Adrian: 16
Masuaku: 13
Kouyate: 10
Noble: 10
Reid: 8.5
Tore: 6.5
Byram: 6.5
Payet: 6
Nordtveit: 5
Valencia: 4
Ogbonna: 2
Calleri: 2
Lanzini: 1.5
Carroll: 1.5
Obiang: 1.5
Fletcher: 1
Ayew: 1
Zaza: 0
For those of you asking why Zaza got 0: Statistically, I can’t award him points for his movement and hold up play early on. He started (?1) but picked up a yellow card for lack of discipline (?1) =0.