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The HamburgHammer Column

One step closer to Wembley and some fresh faces on display

The Predictor League for Crystal Palace is open. Enter your team HERE. Deadline is Tuesday at 4pm.

This is going to be a predominantly positive article. And it’s a deliberate decision of mine. Partly to do with our highly professional performance in the FA Cup against a hopelessly inferior Doncaster Rovers team. But also as a result of looking back at some of the exchanges in the comment section on previous articles where I got a bit hot under the collar.
And, to be fair, some of the comments from my fellow posters got me thinking.

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Indeed I sometimes feel like poor old Don Quixote fighting windmills when ranting, raving and spitting fire over our esteemed owners. Indeed there is going be a day eventually when they cease to own and run this club and when that particularly eventful chapter in our history will be closed.

It’ll be no surprise for you to hear that this will be a day of unfettered joy for me, I might light a vanilla-scented candle for the occasion, open a bottle of bubbly or baltic porter and maybe even sacrifice a goat down my local church to appease and honour the football deities (although that kind of bloodshed seems to be frowned upon these days, especially at my local church!), but you get what I’m saying here.

My local church, by the way, is named Church of the Cross, but I doubt they named it after our very own David “Psycho” Cross…;-))

Whatever I say on here (or how often), no matter how passionate I may be while doing my moaning and moping around, it won’t make that final day of their ownership arrive any faster. But arrive it surely will! Today we are already one day closer to it happening actually.

So I am determined to dial it down a notch in future, you all know what I think about GSB, so I shall try to simply enjoy the fantastic ride we’re on in league and cup for the time being and not worry too much about all the other stuff, silly transfer rumours or any other off-field shenanigans.

Que sera, whatever will be, will be, we’re going to Wemberley!
Not physically, with fans inside the stadium and all that, obviously, but I am confident we can go far in the FA Cup this year. It’s up for grabs, that’s for sure, with clubs like Man United or Leicester likely to focus their attention on the league title and/or international competition.

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So, back to that cup game against Donny. There were plenty of things to appreciate in this one. I already mentioned our professional and determined approach throughout. Yes, Moyes rested many of our key players with an eye already firmly cast on our next tough league game away to Palace.

But every single West Ham starter on that pitch put in a proper shift with all eyes and feet set firmly on the prize of a big next round encounter away at Anfield or Old Trafford. Now confirmed to be the latter.

I hadn’t even taken my first customary sip of Rosie from my lucky West Ham mug and the ball was in the net already for the first time, thanks to our Spanish Duracell Bunny Pablo Four Nails! Does the geezer ever stop running ?

The Doncaster players must have felt as if they had forgotten all their fork handles for battle on the bus, from that point on you could see the belief constantly seeping out of their team with every passing minute. They looked very much beaten after that early goal.

Doncaster, as I had alluded to in a previous comment, were really weak in midfield which meant that we were given the keys to the pitch basically, resulting in one attacking wave after another rolling into Doncaster’s penalty box and on another day we might have scored six or seven.
We didn’t. That’s the negativity for this article done and over with!

Yarmolenko showed that he may be a decent enough option to play upfront occasionally if we need him there to give Antonio a breather (in case we don’t get to sign a striker in this transfer window after all, we might also see young Oladapo Afolayan on the bench more often ).

Yarmolenko took his goal beautifully and was working very hard all game long, also tracking back and helping out with defensive duties.

I cannot single out a single player who was disappointing. Ben Johnson was doing admirably well on the left side which, as we all know, isn’t his forte. But he stepped up to the plate and, you guessed it, put in a shift.
Benrahma was constantly trying to create, same as Lanzini and while they were unlucky in terms of scoring there was plenty of effort and desire there. In fact I thought the entire team were enjoying that game tremendously which felt more like a glorified training fixture than a proper competitive game.

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Noble was instrumental, covering most areas of the pitch, picking passes, intercepting balls, working his socks off. It may only have been League One opposition, but he had a fine game. At the back we looked solid. So much so that it didn’t look like just a good day at the office but more like a leisurely afternoon stroll out in the park.

I reckon we are set up quite nicely in terms of CBs. Ogbonna is obviously our key defender, but I reckon it doesn’t matter much if you put Dawson next to him. Or Balbuena. Or Diop. All very reliable and they all seem to understand the system Moyes has implemented at our club.

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I love how Moyes is gradually introducing youngsters, bedding them into the first team gently. This may be out of necessity due to our thin squad and games coming at us thick and fast, but it’s still good to see.
Take players like Ben Johnson starting. Take Moyes’s decision to give a debut/cameo to Oladapo Afolayan, an aggressive and pacy striker, maybe also a late bloomer in the Antonio mould.
(“Dapo“ returned the favour by scoring not long after coming on.)

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Take the introduction of young defender Jamal Baptiste aka “Barry the Baptiste”, probably our top-ranked youth prospect these days. Or look at the gaffer’s move to give goalkeeping prospect Nathan Trott his first team debut late on with the win already in the bag and nothing to play for except keeping a clean sheet.

Trott didn’t have anything significant to do, but his heart will have been bursting with pride regardless. Always a big moment, that much anticipated debut for the first team, innit ?

And I guess that Fabianski has never flashed a bigger smile when being pulled from a game in his entire career…

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We have a got a good thing going here, thanks to the ability of Moyes to get the best out of the players he’s got at the club. It’s about work ethic. About effort, desire, stamina. And about being a team player.
We have got players running and fighting for one another. It’s a team in the true sense of the word. Maybe that’s why the gaffer is reluctant to sign just any old player offered to him.

Whoever we bring in, be that on loan or on a permanent contract, needs to fit into the current group of lads in the dressing room.

That’s another thing why I am no longer overly concerned with the signings we may make or fail to make in the coming days. Adversity may be ahead caused by injuries, suspensions, self-isolation due to Covid. But I think Moyes can prevail by finding solutions and use players in different ways who can and will perform despite being asked to deputise in an unfamiliar role. They will give it a shot and try their best, not just for Moyes, but for their teammates.

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I wouldn’t expect Palace to particularly fancy having to face us tomorrow. They have numerous players out with injury while we have the luxury of being able to field well rested regular starters like Ogbonna, Coufal, Rice and Antonio. So I am already buzzing for tomorrow. I would predict Moyes to field a very strong side that will hopefully be too much for Palace to handle under the Selhurst Park lights in South London. COYI!!!

Health update from my brother: This will get a bit technical, so skip if you’re not interested. My brother phoned me up just half an hour or so before our game to give me the heads up after he had been given the results of his MRI scan on Thursday.

The bad news is they found loads of little metastases on his liver that were too tiny to spot during the CT scan they did just before Christmas.
The good news is that the doctors have a pretty good grasp and idea of how to tackle this issue and finally get rid of his cancer. There is a specialised surgeon at a local hospital here in Hamburg who has developed a reasonably new method of therapy for this type of cancer.
In a relatively short space of time this medical expert has been performing the procedure dozens of times already on both local patients and numerous others coming from far and wide. And his method seems to have worked a treat so far.

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The therapy is exploiting the fact that apparently healthy liver cells and cancer cells are being supported by separate systems of blood vessels. So the doctor can somehow isolate specifically those blood vessels nurturing the cancerous cells and then flood that system within the liver with a highly concentrated dose of chemo therapy for two hours or so. Dipping the tumour supply line in pure poison basically. If they injected that level of poison into my brother’s system the usual way via a so called chemo port it would certainly kill him within an hour, like the bite of a black mamba would.

But by doing keyhole surgery on the liver they can essentially flush his cancerous cells (or rather the blood nurturing those cells) with the deadly poison, with pinpoint precision, keeping his healthy cells completely unaffected by the chemo. That’s how my brother explained it to me.

I cannot claim to have understood every detail but the key thing is that both his oncologist and the surgeon seem to know exactly what they’re doing. And they have decided that this will give my brother the best chance of getting rid of his cancer after almost six years of fighting, setbacks and new hope. Keyhole surgery is likely to go ahead early next month. Fingers crossed and all that, but it sounds promising.
Thanks for your continued support, positive thoughts and words of encouragement. It’s very highly appreciated.

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Hamburg football update: It’s still a lovely view for HSV, looking down from the top of the Bundesliga 2 table upon their footballing kingdom. Saturday’s game was a lot harder than expected though, seeing Braunschweig racing into a 2:0 lead, but that must have woken up the Hamburg lads as they won the game 4:2 in the end.

St.Pauli also had a successful weekend as they beat relegation rivals Regensburg 2:0. After back-to-back wins they have finally waved goodbye to the relegation spots for the time being. The Boys in Brown are in 15th place now and out of all the teams in and around the relegation zone they are currently enjoying the best run of form over the last 5 games. Looks like the four players who have arrived at St.Pauli in the January transfer window are making a difference to performances and results.

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