This will be a rather short column, for a variety of reasons. a) West Ham didn’t play, so there’s no game to discuss. And b) There haven’t been too many rumours/news of substance to debate either. I also could add c) that I can’t be bothered to bash the owners again as that is by now even boring me.
Of course there have been some murmurs in certain papers about potential replacements for Slaven Bilic being lined up, should our team fail to pick up both in terms of form and results during the remainder of the season.
Some have mentioned Mancini who by all accounts is a very good manager, with bags of experience and surely he is a household name in European football, then again I am not sure he would be willing or capable to work for a club under, let’s say, certain financial constraints in terms of transfer funds.
Another name being bandied about has been Jaap Stam, but that’s lazy journalism in my view. Stam is just starting his managerial career at Reading and you’d have to be very brave if you wanted to throw him into the hot seat at our club in the summer with no previous experience at a club playing top flight football in a reasonably respectable league in Europe.
I want to see our team show some guts, blood, sweat, tears and spit if need be for the rest of our season. Not just for Bilic’s sake, although of course I hope that Bilic will remain at the helm for many more years. But then again you already knew that. I hope that our team can light a spark and instill some much needed pride and passion into the support from our fans, not necessarily away from home, that has never been an issue, but for the home games.
With the long-term injuries suffered by Obiang and Reid (and doubts over Antonio) we may now have to rely on some of the bench players to step up and be counted, old battlehorses like Collins, maybe even guys like Nordtveit. There have been murmurs of a big clearout of players in the summer, so for some of these players this is the time for them to show the club and the manager that they deserve to still be West Ham players next season. For our players there should indeed be no such thing as meaningless games, especially as we aren’t even mathematically safe yet.
As for Concordia, a lot of things have happened at my little local club in the past week, the manager has been given the tin tack for announcing in the press he wouldn’t sign a new deal, rather than speaking to the club about it first. With the trust between manager and club gone, there was only one choice. Apparently this decision also led to the assistant manager, the goalkeeping coach and the physio to pack it in. A new manager has been hired already, but even the new manager trick didn’t quite work, delivering only a 2:2 home draw against our Turkish friends from FC Turkiye (very much the Millwall in our league, they even play south of the river). It’s an eight point gap now between Concordia and the table toppers and I fully expect them to announce in the coming days they won’t be applying for promotion to the Regionalliga anyway, even if they could still qualify results-wise in theory – the deadline is at the end of this week.
Promotion would have been nice, but what’s the point really if you don’t have the money, the stadium and the backing of the fans to make the next step?
You don’t want to put your club at financial risk just so you can draw maybe another 100 fans on average for home games.
So, it’s off to Hull next (will the post make another MOTM worthy appearance or is he suspended ?), a game that unfortunately I will not be able to watch, not live anyway, as my best friend is getting married and I somehow couldn’t convince him to switch the date because of a West Ham game. Then again, we are all way past 40, so it will not be a massive do anyway, the banter will be more important than the booze, so maybe I will watch highlights or a rerun online later that night or the next day.
Wishing you all a pleasant week and counting down the days until my next trip over which will be the Spurs game, with flights and accommodation already sorted. COYI!