hammers road to recovery starts here

Sometimes after a game of watching a game of football I am relieved that I am a West Ham fan and not a fan of the opposition and Saturday was one of those games. Hammers fans do like their football to be played with the ball on the floor with good neat passing, I’ve got nothing against Stoke and the way they play but that style of football, get the ball up front as quick as possible, has never pleased my eye. To be fair to Stoke their wide players Pennant and Etherington are good football players and their goal resulted from good football so why they revert back to route 1 I cant quite understand. Etherington is a player reborn from the one that left West Ham but I think that’s as much to do with leaving London and all the problems it caused him than the change of football team.

West Hams players still look a bit short on confidence that a win would give them but as every game passes they look more together as a team understanding each other’s movements. We looked particular strong in midfield with the 3 men, Parker, Noble and Behrami playing very well as a unit which to be fair they should do as this is the 1 area of the pith where the hammers have some continuity as all 3 have been at the club together for a couple of years. Parker has become West Hams talisman, the Heartbeat of everything good that we do his non stop movement, range of passing and now he is starting to add goals to his game, already he looks favourite to win the hammer of the year, which would be his third on the trot and only Sir Trevor Brooking has managed that achievement.

Avram Grants decision to play three up front was a bold move which looks like paying off once the three of them get more game time together on the pitch I can see them bringing the goals that our performances are lacking. Victor Obinna and Freddie Piquionne have plenty of pace between them and both linked well with Carlton Cole who holds the ball well. The only problem so far with those three is the lack of goals they have scored, none to be exact, I know its only 5 games into a the season but playing all the pretty passing football in the world still counts for nothing if we don’t score. All our goals this season, only 3, have come from midfielders, 2 for Parker and a Noble penalty, if your strikers’ are not scoring you can bet that a tough season in a relegation battle is ahead. Perhaps the hiring of a striking coach may be the way forward, and no I don’t mean Bob Crow from the RMT, Paolo di Canio may be one or Ian Wright, after all we have specialist Goalkeeper coaches and while Di Canio would be more welcome by the fans there is no doubt that Ian Wright was one the best ever Premiership goal scorers, all we got to do is convince him to give up his TV work and to be honest he was a better footballer than he ever will be on the telly. Goal scorers short of confidence in their own ability always seem to struggle to hit the net, always taking that one too many touch of the ball before shooting or holding on to the ball for too long when there’s a better placed player so who better than Wright or Di Canio to get our forwards back in the goals.

In defence Mat Upson had his 4^th different partner next to him in 5 games, which is perhaps the reason why we have conceded so many goals and amazingly West Ham have used 10 different players in their back 4 this season I doubt if any other team has used this many and it shows as we have the worst goal difference in the league. When I saw the teams line up I thought that with no recognised Left back that we would struggle, why there was no Illunga I don’t know but Danny Gabbidon filled in quite well there and his extra height came in use with the bombardment of balls and log throws into the box, if this was a tactical decision then perhaps the manager deserves a pat on the back, if it wasn’t then he just got lucky because it was an improvement on the previous games defences.

So as we celebrate getting our first point of the season we march onwards to our next league game, well its only Tottenham at home, and our first 3 points of the season, fingers crossed.

Avram puts his faith in the team

With the official news of Avram Grants non-attendance for the Stoke game at the Britannia Stadium on Saturday for Religious reasons, many West Ham fans seem to feel bemused to put it politely. In this day and age in modern Britain many of us are not religious and do not follow any faith, so some may find it hard to understand the reasons as to why he wont be attending. So with that in mind I would like to try and explain what Yom Kippur is.

Yom Kippur is known also as the Day of Atonement, this is the most sacred of Holy days in the Jewish calendar, and it would be like Christmas day and Easter Sunday combined. This is the day that God forgave the Jews for their sins in creating a golden calf, which they worshipped when they thought Moses would not be coming down from Mount Sinai here he had been for Three months. God had forbidden all worship of other Gods or Idols. Moses spent three months pleading with God for forgiveness and on the 10^th day of Tishrei, Which is the Hebrew month that falls in September and October, he granted them forgiveness and from that day on it was known as the Day of Atonement. Now to celebrate this from just before sunset on Friday until sunset on Saturday Jews will fast, no food or drink, they are not allowed to work on this day and should spend most of the day in Prayer either at home or in the synagogue.

 This is the first time in Avram Grants management career in England that this day falls on a match day and I expect that this would have been known to the club as soon as the fixture list came out it’s a pity that they didn’t try and move the game to the Sunday and then none of this fuss would be occurring but I doubt if anyone (at the club) expected the poor start to the season which has magnified this problem out of all proportions. A lot of fans have been complaining about the start we have made and calling in to judgement Grants ability to manage and are now using this as another stick with which to beat him with, If you took the last four games we have played but spaced them out through the season but with the same results, not too many would be surprised that we had lost them, the problem stems from the fact that they are at the start of the season and all together. A small minority of fans are using his faith and religion to attack Grant; this is unacceptable but all us (so called) normal fans can do is show Avram that they are a small minority and give our support to him, not just him but to the players as well.

I am putting my Faith in Avram Grant, his assistant and coaches to get the players to do what they do best and then the results will start to go our way

Dont write the Hammers obituary just yet

In Avram Grants programme notes this week he spoke of the fact that some of Chelsea’s success was down to the fact that they had been together as a team for a few years, this is something West Ham cannot claim to have, 3 players were playing their first league games for the hammers while only 3 others have managed over 100 league games for West ham. If you look back to the corresponding fixture 5 years ago, also a 3-1 defeat, 4 Chelsea players played in that game and if it wasn’t for Frank Lampards injury it would have been 5.

In this transfer window alone they brought in 8 players alone add to the players signed in emergency in January and this year alone West Ham have signed nearly a complete new team, perhaps this is the reason that for some periods of the games so far we have played like strangers. Armed with this knowledge I do struggle to believe the criticism aimed at Avaram Grant not only by the restless fans but also by the press who choose to ignore the tough fixtures handed out to West Ham to start the season with and the fact that when the transfer window closed his new players flew off to play for their countries.  Yes when you look at the league table it does not look good especially when you see Blackpool are currently 4^th with 7 points but last season Burnley had 6 points after 4 games and hull had managed 4 yet both teams still went down, After the game when questioned by some sections of the media if he was worried he rightly said if we are in this position after 20 games the maybe but after only four games no he is not worried. Every Hammers fan at the game would say that in the second half we played the more attacking football, maybe without creating clear cut chance but then we were playing the reigning champions who until Scott Parkers late goal hadn’t conceded this season and if Freddie Piquionne had not hit the bar when it seemed easier to score the last few minutes of the game would have been a lot tenser for Chelsea than they were. The fans have witnessed 90 minutes of pretty decent football at Upton Park in the two games that have been played there, it is just a shame that the first 45 came in the first half against Bolton and the second came in the second half against Chelsea, so if we could get them to play that way for a whole game then we should be up and running.

I have said it before and I will say it again, West Ham will not go down this season, by the end of November I expect us to be sitting out of the bottom three quite comfortably, in 2008-09,Franco Zola’s first season, at Christmas West Ham were 17^th one point above Man city with 19 points, 6 league games later, 4 wins and 2 draws, we were sitting 8^th with 33 points. When Zola took over as manager he won his first 2 premiership games but then only won once in the next 12 games and yet we still managed to finish 9^th at the end of the season so as you see now is not the time to be writing our premiership obituary, there is a lot of life left in this season with any more twist and turns to come.

One last note Bobby Zamora broke his leg playing for Fulham against Wolves this weekend and im sure many West Ham fans would like to wish Bobby a speedy recovery and hope to see him back playing soon. I think he is one player that Hammers fans would like to see back at Upton Park.

Why the SBOBET cup

The phony war is over the real battles are about to begin, 38 of them to be precise, at last the new season starts next Saturday. West Ham finished their pre season with a game against Deportivo La Coruna which I dwell on too much as just to say that it finished 0-0 and the Hammers won 5-3 on penalties, the first time I have ever seen West Ham convert all 5 penalties in a shootout, to lift the newly renamed SBOBET Cup, formally the Bobby Moore Cup. Why they felt the need to change the name of the trophy only the club can answer but when you remove the name off the trophy of probably the most famous player to play for West Ham and replace it with the name of your main sponsor, it does smack of commercialism .Its possibly a thank you to the sponsors for the fact that they paid all their shirt money for three years upfront to bail out the club when the money was running out when the Icelandic’s went broke but to me its just further proof that football is all about the money ,Tradition and history can be pushed aside only to be used when needed ,like when launching your new teams strip .

Last season West Ham struggled to sell their shirts and at one point in the season you could get a shirt for only £10, if you had a football team you could get 11 for the price of ten, the reason for this was that just one month into the new season they announced that they were changing kit suppliers when their present contract finished at the end of the season meaning that the shirts that were on sale in the club shops would only last for that season. When the new owners arrived and saw the tens of thousands of unsold shirts they had to act which to be fair to them they did. Forward to this season and West Ham launched the Away strip first ,a homage to the change strip worn in the late 60s,early 70,s and to advertise this they use a picture of  Bobby Moore in the strip ,good enough to sell shirts but not good enough to keep his name on a cup .

The club have only embraced Bobby Moore since his far too early death from cancer, A bust of him was commissioned, A statue built to mark his finest hour, West Ham sorry ENGLAND winning the world cup and also the naming of the first new stand built at Upton Park after the Taylor report pushing clubs towards all seated stadiums. West Ham were already building this stand when Bobby died and did not have a name for it while this was the logical choice the cynical in me thinks that it wouldn’t be called THE BOBBY MOORE STAND if he was still alive.

To be fair to the club they do raise money for the cancer trust set up in his name and the shirt sponsors did donate £10,000 to the Bobby Moore Cancer Trust before the friendly started, unfortunately I come from an age before football was commercialised and therefore always look back to the so called good old days before the premier league started and clubs became businesses.

It’s a hard juggling act clubs have in trying to modernise and survive as a business and yet not lose sight of their heritage and history one that West Ham normally does well at, after all at this moment in time West Hams glory days are behind them as emphasised in the games programme where through out this season they are celebrating the silver anniversary of West Hams highest league finish of 3rd ,a season that came out of the blue  and has never been repeated, but fingers crossed at the beginning  of every season we start level on points with the so called big 4 and after the first game the most we will be off top spot is only 3 points ,that for me is the best bit of the start of the season ,The optimism, which is why I like normally to avoid pre season games , like the Deportivo game , because my optimism has been diminished by the realism of after  the way west ham played perhaps our glory days will still be in the past and that this season is another one of false hope interspersed with flashes of brilliance. When I walked to yesterday’s game I was expecting to write about the new dawn of West Ham yet due to the tedious nature of the game I walked out afterwards feeling the way above