Ich wünsche allen Lesern und Autoren von WHTID ein frohes, neues und hoffentlich gesundes Jahr 2017! (Wishing all readers and authors on WHTID a happy new and hopefully healthy 2017!) While some may still be nursing a bit of a hangover from the New Year celebrations there is no time to waste as the games are coming thick and fast for our Hammers this week.
My quick recap of the game against the Foxes is still a positive one overall, despite a disappointing scoreline. While I was getting myself up and ready for the New Year’s Eve family do at my brother’s place I found myself busier with watching the game than choosing clothes though. It was a fantastic game of football, end to end stuff, with some fierce challenges being thrown in, plenty of incidents and West Ham had the Foxes under the kosh for long periods of the game especially in the second half.
Of course we failed to score which was the big downside in this game (apart from potentially losing Noble for a few games due to the Leicester player trying to determine the strength of Noble’s kneecap). It’s been discussed at length on various other threads, but we are still making too many mistakes, sending passes astray, not chasing the opposition enough to win the ball back and I also noted how many set pieces we wasted against Leicester. I know we are the most successful team in the Premier league this season so far when it comes to scoring from set pieces. But unfortunately it didn’t show this time, with both cornerkicks and freekicks too often not finding a West Ham player, but sailing into no man’s land.or wide of the goal.
We certainly lack some pace when trying to switch from defending into attacking mode. We still lose or give away the ball too cheaply and while I love Carroll to bits for what he does on the pitch it limits our overall game in other ways. We will also lose Ayew and Kouyate for the duration of the African Cup of Nations.
This transfer window will once again put our board to the test: Will they learn from past mistakes and finally strengthen the positions we have failed to address in several windows in succession ?
Will we finally bring in someone who will make the RB position his own for years to come instead of being a stop gap ?
Will we bring in a proper striker who can actually score goals on a regular basis, preferably someone who gives us something different than Carroll ?
I would love us to bring in a pacy forward, someone who can make runs into space and who isn’t afraid to take defenders on.
I don’t have a fixation with a particular player like Bacca or Defoe, Hogan or Long. I just hope it’ll be a player who can help us out straight away, not some dodgy last day signing from the Bolivian Second Division.
I am confident that instead of just trading water our board will be looking to fix the holes in our squad to make sure we not only stay in the league (minimum requirement) but finish as high in the table as possibly. The Man U game coming up will be a tough one, it is a game I would have loved to see live in London, but it wasn’t possible for me to travel at such short notice and so shortly again after my recent visit.
Games against a Mourinho led team always have a little bit of extra spice, passion and entertainment value. We tend to raise our games against the big boys, so I hope it shall be the same this time. As most Germans tend to do on New Year’s Eve my brother’s family and I had a lovely fondue dinner. One thing you need in order to enjoy your fondue is to be patient as it takes time for your meat to cook through properly and the pieces are relatively small, so it takes a while until you have your fill, but it is ultimately very satisfying and also very communicative around the table (and of course there’s also salad and bread and so forth).
I hope our performance against Man U will be just like that, little steps, a patient approach, calm and composed with a result that will be ultimately satisfying. You all know how much I despise Mourinho as a manager and person (at least in terms of the public persona he displays in the media and public eye), so getting one over Manchester United has become that much more enticing for me.
Let me tell you once again how much I’m enjoying writing on here and I hope to be able to continue doing so on a regular basis in 2017 too. I know you will never please everyone all the time, but that’s the beauty of this blog, It offers something for every Hammers fan out there. So if you don’t like my stuff I trust that you may get more enjoyment from reading the articles of my fellow writers which I’d recommend you to read anyway.
Final note on Concordia as some of you were interested. There is a winter break until mid-February (despite mild temperatures), but the next action for the lads is on Sunday, an indoor footie tournament against nine other local sides in the same venue in Wandsbek where the Klitschko brothers had their first profesional fights after they had moved to Hamburg full time. In general I am not a fan of indoor football, but I shall be making an exception here as I do need my regular football fix and there’s no way I’m gonna wait another six weeks for my next game. COYI!