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Injury hit Hammers face rising expectations — opposition focus
Injury hit Hammers face rising expectations — opposition focus
Friday, 18th Jan 2013 01:12 by Clive Whittingham

After a fantastic first half to the Premier League season after promotion, West Ham may find it difficult to maintain their current level in the coming months as reality and injuries bite.

Overview

Sam Allardyce has never been a man shy of talking talking the big talk. It was he who once famously said that he’d have been given one of the top jobs in European football if his surname was Allardici, a pointed criticism at English clubs’ thirst for an exotic foreign coach rather than a good, honest, hard working Brit like him or his mate Peter ‘Reidy’ Reid.

It was also Allardyce who immediately vowed to sue the BBC when they aired a documentary alleging that new signings he made at Bolton Wanderers were being ‘encouraged’ to switch agents and employ his son Craig, with the subsequent commissions from deals then going back into the Allardyce family. He never did quite get round to that legal action.

Therefore it’s somewhat odd to find Allardyce seeking out any journalist that will listen this week to prophesise doom and gloom. Too many injuries, missed targets in the transfer window, fixture backlog, a defensive crisis and a lack of goals have been a recurring theme. He left Joe Cole in London this week because he didn’t feel his legs were up to a Man Utd cup replay on Wednesday and then a QPR league match on Saturday – perhaps Cole wasn’t such a sound purchase after all then? After the sadly inevitable defeat in Manchester, Allardyce pointed out that QPR (just two victories all season in the league and very firmly bottom of the pile) had enjoyed 24 hours more rest ahead of this weekend’s game.

The West Ham boss is becoming the football equivalent of a winter edition of the Daily Express. Essentially he’s looked at the long term forecast, been told to expect 5cm of snow, and is exaggerating that to be the end of the world. The trouble is, he’s right to do so. In Britain the whole country grins to a halt in 5cm of snow, and in the modern game of football even slight downturns in form are reasons for inquiries, protests and - more to the point for Allardyce - sackings.

It’s easy to forget, because they’ve been a regular (but not constant) part of the Premier League since it launched in 1992 and they’ve done very well in the first half of this season, that West Ham are actually one of the three newly promoted sides this season. Had they battled gamely all year and scrapped through the long cold winter to finish sixteenth, four or five points clear of the bottom three, they would no doubt have reflected on a job reasonably done. Promotion achieved, relegation avoided, now for the consolidation bit before the push onwards and upwards.

But West Ham haven’t been battling and scrapping, they’ve been winning and impressing. They, along with West Brom, were the surprise packages of the first half of the season and have both spent almost the entire campaign to date in the top half of the table. At Loftus Road earlier in the season, against an admittedly abysmally set up QPR team, they looked strong, confident, creative and dangerous. They won 2-1 and it flattered the defeated side. Against Chelsea at Upton Park they were wonderful value for a 3-1 win. In Mo Diame they have made one of the signings of the season by picking up an outstanding midfield talent, now much sought after by the bigger clubs, on a free. Things could scarcely have gone better to this point.

In reality it’s difficult for clubs like West Ham and West Brom to sustain this sort of form throughout a Premier League season. They tend to carry competitive starting elevens but lack strength in depth because a quality player isn’t going to want to go and sit on the bench at West Ham, and they couldn’t afford to pay him big money to do so in any case. The Baggies have picked up injuries of late, and looked tired and jaded in crashing out of the FA Cup against QPR during the week. The Hammers have won only two of the last 12, and have scored just five goals away from home all season. They too are now struggling for numbers, particularly in defence. It’s looking rather inevitable at the moment that Steve Clarke’s men may well fall back to somewhere around tenth to twelfth, and West Ham a little lower than that. Both will almost certainly survive – the Hammers are 12 points ahead of Rangers with 16 league games left to play – and that would have been the prime aim for both at the start of the campaign, but their early over-achievement could turn out to be a curse for the managers that helped them do it.

People are going to start asking questions. People like Bryan Swanson and Adrian Durham. People who drive white vans and ring into TalkSport to say they never really liked Sam Allardyce in the first place. Questions like where that early season form has gone? Why the team isn’t winning any more? Why the team is falling down the division? What are the managers going to do about it? Has the manager lost the dressing room? Should the manager actually be sacked before it’s too late? This is the lousy, dislikeable, short termist, shit infested, loathsome ‘sport’ we follow these days and Allardyce knows it only too well. There’s always a team that falls down the league in the second half of the season they say, these people who keep talking.

If Allardyce and his dogmatic team stay true to form, then he’s simply talking them down ready to inflict a dire but important 1-0 defeat on QPR this weekend. If they do happen to lose to the lowly R’s, then he’s simply getting his excuses in early. With the job he’s done at Upton Park so far – inheriting a mess, getting it promoted back to the Premier League at the first time of asking while often being very noisily criticised by the club’s supporters, and now looking all set to keep them there with something to spare - it’s rather sad that he feels the need to do either.

Not for the first time I’m force to conclude that I dislike football a little more every day.

Interview

West Ham fan Ollie Dearn has been bullied into speaking to LFW for the second time this season about the latest situation at Upton Park. As ever, we’re grateful for him not putting up too much resistance.

Is it fair to say West Ham have exceeded expectations so far this season? Do you expect them to fall back a little in the second half of the season or maintain the current upward trajectory?

Bit of a mixed bag so far. Overall, yeah – if you’d have offered us 26 points and elevent place after 21 games, we’d have bitten hands off – but our strong start and, more to the point, worrying recent form, have tempered that. It’s a relief to have points on the board, but two wins in ten isn’t good and our away form – with only five goals all year – is dire. Our home form has dipped recently too, losing a couple on the bounce before getting back on track – slightly fortuitously – against Norwich on New Year’s Day. It’s all getting a bit tight down the bottom, and we need to get back on track sooner rather than later to avoid getting sucked in to the scrap. That said, I do think we’ll be OK and will probably end up a very Allardyce-esque tenth to fourteenth.

Who have been the key players behind the success? Who is your player of the season so far?

Player of the Season so far is between Mark Noble and Winston Reid, and I’d be surprised if that’s any different come May. I think Reid just shades about it – he’s been an absolute rock at the back and has barely put a foot wrong. Safe to say, he’s unrecognisable from the player he was under Avram Grant. Noble just links everything up. With a midfield three that includes Nolan (our top scorer, but not a huge contributor to the midfield engine), we rely on him to win the ball and to link the defence and attack. Without him we look short of ideas and can gravitate to the long pass forward. Diame (who gets an honourable mention) is good at this too but without Noble’s range of passing.

And is Sam Allardyce now the darling of Upton Park? Or are there still critics?

Very few. The man has performed a minor miracle to get us where we are from where we were when he took charge. Credit must go to the owners too, and Gold, Sullivan and Allardyce do seem to have a very good working relationship.

We’ve got good team spirit, real backbone and fight for everything. We’re not (often) easy to beat. There’s a real feel-good factor around the club at the moment, and a lot of that is down to him. He’s implemented a sensible transfer policy, got the club playing well and brought in players who do seem to give a shit. All of these things have been in short supply over the past five years. Darling perhaps not, but he is edging toward a kind of cult status at the Boleyn – helped no end by the seemingly limitless supply of captionable pictures he provides.

With Carroll only on loan and rarely fit, Carlton Cole apparently told he can leave and Chamakh in on loan now is it fair to say the centre forward position is a bit of an issue? What's the solution there?

Sorting out the centre forward position should be our priority this summer. It’s so crucial to the way we play, and nothing Sam’s tried has particularly worked – I get the feeling he’s looking for another Kevin Davies; a long-term, reliable solution.

Cole’s actually played well since Carroll’s latest injury, and I’d like to see us keep him - Allardyce has refuted the rumours of him leaving - but he’s not prolific enough. We won’t shell out £15m+ on Carroll permanently, and Maiga seems to be surplus to requirements. Chamakh I think could do OK here, but whether he’s a solution beyond this season I have no idea.

The solution is someone strong, who can bully defenders and hold up the ball, but will also chip in with regular goals. Lambert at Southampton has been mentioned by the tabloids, but I can’t see it happening – and anyway, he’s 30. But that’s the kind of player we should be after. Lukaku at Chelsea fits that bill too, but it isn’t going to happen. Assuming Villa continue their current downward trajectory, Christian Benteke could be a good shout in the summer.

Tell us about your January signings so far - who have you brought in, how have they been received by the fans? Are there more to come? What do you need - where are the weak links?

Young Irish lad (Sean Maguire) described as the ‘Irish Messi’ by his old manager – won’t bother the first team this year. It’s a no-risk signing. There’s certainly some talent to be had in Ireland for cheap (see James McClean at Sunderland), but I’d be surprised if we hear from him again.

Wellington Paulista – a 28 year-old Brazilian from Cruzeiro. It’s a six-month loan with the option of three years at the end of it, which seems to indicate there’s at least some hope of him making it over here. Again, a risk-free signing. He looks good on YouTube, but so did Julien Faubert.

Chamakh has certainly divided opinion. I think he’ll surprise a few people – a year at Arsenal hasn’t made him a bad player, and he should suit our style. Jack Sullivan, the 11-year-old son of David, isn’t a fan, apparently, Tweeting: ‘I am very sorry about this news Chamakh has sign a 6 month loan deal! not my pick’. Well thank fuck for that.

Joe Cole’s a populist signing but also not a stupid one (unless you’re Liverpool! They’re paying him £50,000 a week for 18 months, we’re paying £30,000). He’s versatile and adds a creative spark we’re lacking. The quality’s still there, his legs never were and he’s been around the block now. Decent bit of business, and nice to see him home. Got off to a great start vs. United in the cup, but never got going away at Sunderland last week. Let’s hope for more of the former.

Allardyce likes to get his transfer activity out of the way early on, so I doubt we’ll see too much more, bar a cheapish left back and an even cheaper CB now that Collins is out for a while. The priority now has to be holding on to Diame.

I presume Harry Redknapp will be well received at Upton Park. What do you make of the mess he's taken on at QPR and the job he's doing?

I’m not so sure. At best it’ll be indifferent – not the most popular in these parts anymore is old Harry. QPR remind me of West Ham under the Icelandics, or like a slow-motion car crash. Hughes is a poor manager and was never the right man for that job, and your summer transfer window business was disastrous: short-sighted, naïve and high-risk. I’m not sure Fernandes knows what to do – I don’t think he ever expected for QPR to be where they are – and chucking money at players like Remy shows he hasn’t learnt his lesson. You have enough mercenaries as it is. The last thing you need is more players who don’t care for anything that isn’t green and wallet-sized, and I’m surprised that Harry’s interested in that kind of player. I’m not convinced he’s the right man for the job, but he does seem to have steadied the ship and you do look harder to beat. Staying up isn’t impossible – as I say, it’s tight down there and on paper there are three worse teams than QPR – but it needs to turn around quickly, clearly. We’re in real danger of getting dragged into the mire if we lose on Saturday. It’s a big game, no doubts about that. Good luck for the rest of the season – I really do fear for you if you go down.

Scout Report

Never before had Mark Hughes’ assertion that the preparation for games carried out by he and his coaching staff was “second to none” and “meticulous” looked quite so ridiculous as it did in the first meeting of these two teams this season. While injuries mean West Ham’s line up is far from certain, the shape it will play in and the style it will adopt is almost certainly known to QPR and what they must do is learn from the mistakes they made in the first game and not fall into the same traps again.

Hughes’ “meticulous” preparation didn’t, it seems, raise any concerns with putting out a featherweight midfield of Ji-Sung Park, Esteban Granero, Ale Faurlin and Shaun Wright-Phillips to face Sam Allardyce’s team in the first game. The result was a barbaric carve up. The Hammers, as they had done in every game before that and every match since, picked a strong central midfield three that shut down any space Granero and Faurlin may have anticipated working in and physically dominated the entire match. Mo Diame was an athletic, leggy, impressive presence; Kevin Nolan a niggly pest and attacking threat; Mark Noble a slightly more cultured but nonetheless assertive link man. The three of them sat together in front of West Ham’s back four and suffocated QPR – bullying them physically, depriving them of space, crowding and dominating the centre of the park. It was the biggest tactical mismatch I can recall seeing.

Further forward Carlton Cole, Matt Jarvis and Ricardo Vaz Te all played well but frankly the platform that had been laid for them meant they’d have struggled not to. Following another demolition – executed in a different style but devastating all the same – against Liverpool at Loftus Road, Rangers have adopted a deeper lying midfield three of their own with Stephane Mbia and Shaun Derry key figures. Park, Faurlin and Esteban Granero have all had a turn in the third spot. I’d be surprised if Redknapp went away from that for this game, but although matching up to the Hammers’ central three will improve the situation, QPR must be wary of turning it into a three v three battle because, even with a more appropriate set up, they’ll struggle to win that.

West Ham’s use of the wider, supporting attackers – usually Jarvis and Vaz Te when they’re fit – has varied depending on who is playing centre forward. When Carroll has been fit they’ve been very deliberate in going long, early, down the middle and the wide players have been asked to funnel in centrally behind the giant Geordie looking for flick ons. When I saw them beat Fulham at Upton Park earlier this season this worked an absolute treat. But at Loftus Road, and in the win at home to Chelsea, it was Cole playing in attack and the focused much more on getting the ball wide early and then providing good service into the box. It’s when they’ve done this that West Ham have been at their most threatening and attractive this season.

QPR can attempt a couple of things on Saturday. West Ham have been vulnerable at centre back for a start. James Collins and Winston Reid had started every game together there until November and while Reid is excelling under Allardyce’s management Collins remains dreadfully accident prone – amateur standard pass backs have already cost them game-changing goals at Swansea and Reading. Collins is now injured leaving James Tomkins and others to fill in there but they don’t convince. If QPR can find Adel Taarabt in the space in front of them, with new boy Loic Remy playing ahead of him, there is joy to be had there.

But that solid, deep lying midfield three means plan B ay be the better option this weekend. West Ham have struggled all season at full back with Tomkins. Guy Demel, Joey O’Brien, George McCartney and now Danny Potts and Jordan Spence all tried on either side of the defence. Potts, son of Steve, has looked good since being thrust into the action but he and Spence are inexperienced, and for all the strength West Ham’s formation provides in the centre of the park it does deprive the full backs of an overlapping winger to help on defensive duties. I’d be tempted to send Taarabt down one side with Remy drifting his way into the channel to provide numbers, skill and speed to trouble one full back, and have Fabio Da Silva really bombing on down the other side to occupy the other.

If the first meeting is anything to go by QPR must concentrate on winning, or at least not losing, the central battle and then concentrate on not only getting good ball into wide areas, but then doing something with it.

Links >>> West Ham Official Website >>> West Ham Blog >>> West Ham Till I Die Blog >>> Scoop It – West Ham news >>> Claret and Blue blog >>> Knees Up Mother Brown message board >>> West Ham Mad site and message board

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Kaos_Agent added 04:52 - Jan 18
I'd like to see Derry, a sane M'Bia, and Faurlin, with Ale putting on a tacking and passing clinic.

One half of me wants to take a measured approach and sub in LR, and the other half wants to chuck him in right away with AT and JM.
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TacticalR added 16:21 - Jan 18
I thought West Ham would have the most difficulties out of the promoted sides, but Allardicio has proved he knows what is necessary for Premiership survival.

Hopefully this match will be a completely different proposition to the match at Loftus Road, and this time we won't get done in midfield, and all our players will know what they are doing.

Given our recent defensive performances against Chelsea and Tottenham, I wouldn't be surprised if we started off with a similarly defensive approach, and if we can weather the storm, then we can adopt a more attacking approach.
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themodfather added 21:41 - Jan 18
west ham are always like xmas decorations, it's the worst joke in football..they come down after xmas!
if, IF qpr ever win back to back games in the prem lge, those above will start to feel the pressure...imo it's off us.
for the record, my older bruv supports west ham and we usually have good games, rarely a boring game.
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