I am still fuming. And shocked. I feel angry and embarrassed. Sick and tired. As a football fan sometimes you can see your team throwing a game away, frightening early signs indicating where things are heading to with alarming predetermination, you can clearly make out the jaws of victory, beckoning in the distance, but you’re also painfully aware of defeat creeping ever closer to those jaws, ready to get snatched at the final moment in place of the aforementioned victory, yet there is nothing you can do, especially if you can only watch the events unfolding on a dodgy internet stream from an armchair 500 miles away from London.
The Saturday for me personally was pretty much a footballing disaster, with two disappointing draws in totally winnable games. First Cordi only drew 1:1 at FC Turkiye (wrong side of the river, shocking atmosphere plus a terrible referee), conceding the softest of penalties (sound familiar ?) in a wet and windy contest on a cabbage field disguised as a football pitch before luckily scoring the equaliser five minutes from time. Turkiye are a shocking football team matching the quality of their home pitch, still Concordia failed to have a proper gameplan and also gave away the ball far too often – the only good thing from that encounter was that I got home fairly quickly after that shocker of a game, just in time to catch Ayew’s screamer late in the first half to give us a comfortable 2:0 lead. Or so I thought…
Surely this is it I said to myself, settling into my comfy armchair, screwdriver in hand. This won’t be yet another false dawn. We will score another goal or two and that’ll be it. Then my internet stream started to play up. It crashed every two minutes or so, replayed the same passage of play three times over and came alive again suddenly with a few minutes of play lost in the abyss. Still I was able to witness Ogbonna conceding the penalty early in the second half Just what the doctor ordered…NOT.
As a professional defender you simply can’t challenge your opponent in your penalty box like this – yes, it was a soft penalty, but there was definite contact and if you give the other guy the opportunity to go down nine times out of ten he will gladly oblige and the referee will blow the whistle, given a chance, and I blame neither the Palace player nor the referee in this instance.
That goal was the big game changer. It threw Palace a lifeline, it breathed new life into a shellshocked home crowd and it made our team nervous for the remainder of the second half. Still, this is what I just don’t get: Why do you allow the opposition to put yourself under the kosh like this ? It’s Palace after all, not Manchester City or Barcelona for crying out loud!
Let’s then jump to roundabout the 80th minute – from then on we were negative and unprofessional beyond belief. How can you begin passing freekicks to the corner flag, trying to waste time rather than creating another goalscoring opportunity to kill off the game for good ?
There were several instances where one of our guys was in a good position to run at the defenders in the Palace box, take them on, make something happen. Yet we tried to win the game by killing time. Again and again.
(Except once right at the end when Antonio didn’t actually keep the ball in the corner which gave Palace the chance to equalise.)
We actually killed our chances of winning by choosing that negative approach coupled with bad decision making by the players. I felt embarrassed watching us in the second half. Even if we were a better team at keeping the ball and wasting some time (which we are not) I don’t like to see that kind of approach from my team…ever. It just feels wrong.
Same as diving, playacting or recklessly tackling an opposition player, embracing the possibility of causing a fellow professional a bad injury in the process.
It’s plain wrong.
Best way to win in my book has always been playing positive football, trying to score, thereby making it harder for the opposition to get back into the game.
I really don’t blame Palace here, they got a much deserved and hard fought point. But who in Bobby Moore’s name was responsible for that negativity shown by us in the second half ? Virtually the ENTIRE second half.
Was it our manager who told the players to timewaste our way to victory ? Was it the players who simply didn’t trust their own ability to score another goal or two against basement boys Palace who, let’s be frank, aren’t exactly world beaters ?
Shooting ourselves in the foot like this again and again won’t help our team to gain some much needed confidence, it’s always one step forward and two steps back for us.
We never play a complete game, giving a professional performance from start to finish, two halves of full effort, desire or swagger. Why is that ?
Just like at Burnley we threw away what would have been a very valuable away win right at the end of the game. It’s doing my nut in.
If we can’t beat a team like Palace after carving out a 2:0 halftime lead against them, what does that say about the character of our team ? It’s nice of course to beat Spurs in the fashion we did last Wednesday in the League Cup. But it’s not much good if you then follow it up with an utterly unprofessional display in the second half like we delivered at Palace.Maybe we should change our name from West Ham United to What If United.
There always is a catch or caveat when it comes to our club. Of course we have seen all of this before and with all our practise we should be used by now to the sheer stupidity and sloppiness of it all, but as a fan you never get used to it, do you ? It still hurts like hell. It stings. And yes, it also stinks.
Once again my screwdriver ended up getting chucked to the floor violently in a fit of anger and disappointment. The season already feels lost to me.
Not in a sense that we will get relegated. We won’t get relegated. But we will keep hovering between 10th and 15th place in the table all season. Throw in the football we’re playing and it’s not a combination you want to fill a 60k stadium next season.
Unfortunately we still have plenty of games to play, but it’s hard to see us even winning two in a row this season. World class players in a world class stadium, you’re havin’ a bubble mate! As mentioned in my column last week, both club and team look rotten right now, things just don’t appear to sit right from top to bottom.
There were merely two things that gave me a genuine reason to smile at the weekend, West Ham wise. One was our development squad beating their Manchester City counterparts with a 2:1 scoreline (and Martinez scoring again). The other was seeing Declan Rice come on as a substitute. I am very impressed with the lad and hope he will get many more opportunities in this nightmare of a season to gain more PL experience and subsequently grow in stature. With Bilic unlikely to be a permanent feature for West Ham now, players like Rice (or Martinez, Quina, Kemp, Burke, Cullen and Holland) continue to give me a valid reason to cheer on the Hammers and hope for better times for the boys in claret and blue.
Take note Messrs. Gold and Sullivan – just because you’re decking out our players in a Man City coloured shirt it doesn’t mean that the players will suddenly have the same skills and quality. It takes more than that. A lot more…maybe more than you are capable or prepared to deliver. COYI!!!