The past few weeks have not been enjoyable. Scrap that. The whole season has been forgettable. Bereft of a full 90 minutes of good, confident football, West Ham are a shadow of last year. Some blame the board, some blame the new stadium, some blame the players. Only now, it seems, are some blaming the manager. True, I have never been a huge Slaven Bilic supporter, but neither do I want to see him go.
That has been the conundrum in my mind recently. The modern West Ham that I particularly don’t like is our tendency to sack managers. Since Harry Redknapp left, it’s been a revolving door. Bilic’s last season gives him a bit of credit in his bank. It should provide him enough space to last until next year. But if next season starts like this one, it will be over.
But let’s not get bogged down in managerial speculation. As with Arsenal this year, as with Spurs when Redknapp was flirting with the England job; it never, ever helps a team to have such a distraction and with us on a losing run (without a win since February), speculation is not the answer.
None of this is a surprise however. For too long, and still to this day, many of us seem content to say: “Oh, it’ll get better, we’ll beat team X and everything will be fine”. We have ignored the problem for too long. When we beat Hull and Burnley at the end of last year, we were content to ignore the awful performances and focus on the 1-0 wins. Well, now those shocking victories are what’s keeping us out of the relegation zone. We comfort ourselves by saying: “Oh well, the other teams around us are awful”. True, but are we that much better? We can barely beat Burnley and Hull at home, and then lost against the latter away. We beat Sunderland at home with a last-minute winner.
We will look towards Saturday with optimism. We always do. Heading to the Emirates, I thought we might get something. At half time, it looked okay. But then I realised as we went 1-0 down, that the floodgates were about to open. Not only can we not win at the moment, we cannot help but lose badly.
3-0 and 5-1 against Arsenal. 4-0, 5-0, and 3-1 against Manchester City. Bilic loves losing big. 3-0 at home against Southampton. Shipping 3 against Leicester and Bournemouth. Letting in 4 against Watford and West Brom. Bilic should be given time but let’s admit this, based on last season and this: he cannot sort out a defense. Regardless of signings and injuries, a manager should be able to make players work in a team and be greater than the sum of their parts. Bilic needs help. Most managers would lose 5-1 or 5-0 and say: “Enough”. Bilic seems to say, “Oh well, maybe next time”.
Slow starts, bad defending, a lack of shots on goal. These were all there to see last season and they are bloody obvious this year. We will comfort ourselves if we beat Sunderland and Swansea. We will ignore this debate and say we’re still a Premier League club.
But remember where we were last year? I argued on here that Champions League was far too optimistic for us and that we’d get battered. Europa League was more achievable. Many said I was a pessimist, that we’d do better than Leicester City in Europe.
A year on, Leicester are doing far better in Europe, while we went out early in the Europa. We are now fighting against relegation. Leicester, who were 12 points behind us not long ago, are now above us. All other clubs around us, bar Sunderland and Boro, have realised their failings and moved on, improved. We have not. To those confident of wins against Swansea and Sunderland: look at this season as a whole, and think whether we actually could win those games and whether we even deserve to. Maybe we will, I hope, but we won’t win them pretty.
Two years ago, we hired Bilic to take us to the next level. Now, we’re in a relegation fight. I want him to stay, but this is not what we were promised. This is not the bright future we had envisioned. I knew the next chapter of West Ham would take a long time to become one of success, I just didn’t know it would be this bad to start.