When I saw the camera zooming in on Noel Gallagher in the crowd at the London Stadium during our by now customary thrashing at the hands of Manchester City, several thoughts were running through my head:
a) He really loves his football, doesn’t he ?
b) Does he cut his own hair or are there no reasonably priced hairdressers still in business in Manchester ?
c) Like with any other Man City fan, I don’ begrudge him City’s wonderful style of football and their current success – they supported their club during their lengthy crap spells, they are proper fans through thick and thin and why shouldn’t they enjoy the ride ?
Plus of course, for a pun-dit like me (see what I did there ?) the Oasis songbook alone affords your average football fan a multitude of colourful puns and plays on words that can be put to good use for any football-related analysis.
See my headline for starters. Cigarettes and alcohol probably were the choices of post-game remedy for many disappointed Hammers on Saturday evening.
Some mights say that we just gotta roll with it, move forward little by little. We need to stop crying our heart out, our board surely have a Masterplan lying around somewhere and if we stand by the team we may not live forever, but might probably be able to keep the dream alive, do you know what I mean ?
Most of the game has been discussed at length in the previous threads. It was men against boys. It looked very much like a preseason training kickabout.
The goals Man City scored against us looked EXACTLY like moves from a preseason training kickabout. I was only surprised at how little time it took Man City to race into a 3:0 lead. Nobody can really be surprised at Manchester City scoring four goals in 90 minutes against anyone.
That’s how good they are.
Stuff that! They are superb. They are not just on another level. Maybe not even on just another planet. But possibly on another planet in another galaxy far far away. So I won’t be moping and moaning the fact we lost by a scoreline of 0:4. Of course our defending looked abysmal, albeit against top quality opposition. Still, we didn’t defend the way a PL team should.
I will cut our team some serious slack though, offensively we did ask a few questions of them, creating some good openings, but again, our conversion rate in terms of decent goalscoring opportunities was terrible. Against lesser opposition we must now begin to tuck those chances away, our lads will need to work their socks off in order to start winning games and climbing that table.
There is a lot of business ahead for us in the January window, both in terms of getting rid of unwanted players (like Oxford), and addressing our squad imbalance, not least due to mounting injury issues. We need another fullback or two (ones that can actually defend), a defensive midfielder and a creative option too by the looks of it as it could well be that Lanzini may have to sit out the rest of the season after all.
Better to allow the injury to heal properly I suppose instead of rushing him back too early…with a knee injury being able to walk and run between cones again is the easy bit, but getting back to a level where you can play football in a highly competitive environment such as the PL is a different matter entirely.
I suppose this is what might have happened with Lanzini: Reasonably quick and steady progress which has hit a wall suddenly, just as Lanzini is returning to the football pitch for some more intense training drills.
Not long to go now before another trip to the airport for my pre-Christmas West Ham trip for the Palace game. I may have to actually break my vow of never buying merchandise again from the club shop while the current board are still in charge – I met my brother recently and he told me that his son, my nephew, was crestfallen because little Daniel had finally outgrown his Farewell Boleyn West Ham shirt with his name and #2 on the back.
He apparently wore that shirt a lot on various occasions because he absolutely loved it (not many kids in his school wearing claret and blue as you can imagine), so I suppose I may have to get him a bigger West Ham garment, maybe a goalkeeper’s shirt this time. Or a sweatshirt or something like that…I’m just glad I seem to have succeeded in at least making West Ham his favourite club in England, I may not be able to stop him from supporting PSG, AC Milan or Real Madrid one day, but I have pretty much nullified the chance he will ever cheer for Liverpool, Chelsea, Manchester United or Spurs…it’s important to cherish the little things in life…LOL
COYI!!!
Hamburg football update: St.Pauli failed to protect a 1:0 lead and conceded a late equaliser, drawing 1:1 at Regensburg. They are in third place in the Bundesliga 2 table, only three points away from table toppers Cologne and well on course for a promotion battle. Hamburg SV will play Union Berlin later this evening. They need a draw or a win to take top spot away from Cologne.
Concordia’s first team finally won a game again, 3:1 at home against Rugenbergen. The result has helped the lads to pull away from the relegation zone for now, with only one more league and one cup game to play this year before the winter break. The U23s won 3:1 away to Reinbek, but their chances of promotion remain strictly mathematical at this point as they have lost five games already this season. History pretty much dictates that you don’t get promoted to the next level if you lose five games or more in any given season. But we’ll see.
And the Cordi women’s team got called off as the opposition team couldn’t find 11 fit players to start the game. This now means that the game will be awarded to Concordia with a 3:0 scoreline which is a bit unfair as goal difference may well be crucial when deciding which team gets promoted or not. I know that the girls were keen to play and win by a higher margin, so that 3:0 win by armchair decision doesn’t really do them any favours…