If you wanna blame anyone for the defeat against Arsenal, just blame me. Usually I watch our games live whenever I can – this Sunday though I deliberately opted against that routine and decided to put the lovely weather in Hamburg to good use and take my brother and ten year old nephew out between the dikes on the southeastern outskirts of town to watch Concordia’s U23s wallop the poor local side by a 10:0 scoreline.
The game was more noteworthy for my little nephew entertaining the travelling away support of about 20 people with his comments, questions and jocular remarks, some of them were hilarious without my nephew even realising, but that’s always the joy when taking a kid to a football game.
For instance, the Concordia president was there too in order to watch his own son play, sitting three metres away from us, but that didn’t stop my nephew exclaiming how the U23s were playing so much better this season compared to Cordi’s first team. Well, he was right of course and the club president saw the funny side of it too and couldn’t suppress a grin.
My nephew by the way still is at odds with the rules of the game in terms of the ref awarding a penalty.
Little Daniel still thinks a penalty kick should happen every time a particularly nasty foul or tackle happens, regardless of where on the pitch said foul has been committed.
FIFA better watch out, there’s a new FIFA president in the making here…:-))
Anyway, it’s nice to watch a team that plays football the right way (albeit against inferior opposition) and it’s also nice to have a promotion celebration to look forward to – I reckon next weekend Cordi’s U23s will be mathematically certain to go up. For every other club I hold an interest in it is still squeaky bum time.
Both Hamburg clubs are in relegation dogfights and even our beloved West Ham ain’t quite out of the woods either.
When returning home I had managed not to hear or read anything about our game, so I could then settle down in my armchair, waving my screwdriver in tune to Bubbles being sung by the travelling Hammers and to be fair, I saw a highly entertaining match from both teams and up to the 80th minute I was fairly certain we could come away from Arsenal with a credible draw. Not so fast my not quite so young Hammer!
That second Arsenal goal broke our collective spirit and determination. Young Declan Rice who was quite superb again up to that point decided to duck out of what looked like the easiest of clearances in front of his own goal, leaving it to Joe Hart to watch the ball trundling into the net.
Lack of communication there and totally unnecessary. When the ball is that close to your own goal you need to deal with it somehow.
You either have set up a routine in training how to act in those situations. Or you make yourself heard loud and clear, so both goalkeeper and defender are on the same page.
It’s frustrating to have lost the game in that fashion (I didn’t even register the goals that still followed) because I think we saw a very decent overall performance from the lads.
Unfortunately a game doesn’t last 79 minutes and when you shoot yourself in the foot like our team did you cannot expect to get away with it in the Premier League.
I ain’t going to tear into Rice, he is young, still learning the game and boy, will he learn from that blunder! In my eyes he is a future West Ham captain, a player well worth building a team around (if we can keep him that long that is) and the kind of guy fans love rooting for. Rice is the player we must hang on to and keep happy at all costs.
I wonder how Rice’s future is going to pan out.
Moyes though is another safety-first manager for me. Defensive minded, very cautious, averse to taking a bit of a risk. There isn’t much that pains me more than to see our striker isolated upfront time and time again, be that Arnautovic or Carroll. You can see the frustration when they look up, from a promising attacking position, trying to locate their nearest teammate only to find him twenty or thirty metres behind. If it was up to me, I’d look for a more attack-minded, a more positive manager.
With the shortened transfer period this summer our club should be busy building our squad for next season already. Not knowing our league status for sure yet doesn’t help obviously. Not knowing who our manager will be doesn’t help either. I’m sure a decision will be made in due course one way or another and we know the board will have their own priorities which may differ from what the fans, the players or even the pundits may want. So all we can do is wait and hope.
Not long to go until I’m over again for the Everton fixture. I am confident we won’t necessarily need the points at that stage. But I’d be very happy to see another of my now customary 1:0 home wins. COYI!!!