EXTRA TIME

Good News on Brexit Day

February 1, 2020 at 12:41 pm Leave a comment

For me Brexit isn’t good news at all. I always was in favour of Remain and of a second people’s vote, but the answer was “We already had one”, and Boris would “get Brexit done”. Now as of 1st of February, the UK really is no longer part of the EU. Will Britain now get great again? Sorry, it will not. So the only good news from London this Friday was the signing of an other new player for West Ham United.

An updated version of this post has been published at West Ham Till I Die on 5 February 2020

In the brilliant book “Rule Britannia. Brexit and the End of Empire” the authors argue that the vote to leave the EU was the last gasp of the old empire working its way out of the British psyche, fuelled by an unrealistic vision of Britain’s future. I wish the UK well in the upcoming negotiations with the EU, but I fear it will be a tough match and in the end the outcome will not be satisfactory. Well, that reminds me of how things panned out at football club West Ham United after leaving the Boleyn (which by the way happened at the same time as the referendum whether to leave the EU).

With the move from Upton Park to the Olympic Stadium the West Ham faithful were promised golden days ahead, the Board was even talking of Champions League football within some years. But now we’ve got the second relegation battle within three years.

Even when the owners, after fan protests inside and outside the unloved new stadium, finally decided to invest a notable amount of money into the squad and hire a decent manager in 2018, it seems we were deluded in some way.

It was not only me who thought that with Manuel Pellegrini, a very successful manager with his former clubs, who had got the job in 2018 and was the highest paid gaffer in West Ham’s history, a “revolution” would start and bring success to a club where fortune’s had been hiding for much too long.

Pellegrini’s first season wasn’t bad. After a slow start with four defeats the players seemed to understand the new way of attacking play the Chilean tried to instil, there were glimpses of a fine style of play dubbed the “West Ham way” in former times, and a number of good results with a lot of goals scored were achieved. Sometimes it seemed the squad had developed a formerly unknown “winning mentality”, and they accumulated more wins in a single month than ever before in Premier League history in December 2018. And last season even I was lucky enough to attend four consecutive wins on my travels to the London Stadium (Burnley 4-2, Crystal Palace 3-2, Arsenal 1-0 and Southampton 3-0).

When the Irons started very well this season, things looked bright and again it wasn’t just me who thought that West Ham had one of the strongest squads in recent history this term and that they would go on to finally win something after many, many years without silverware. This year it is forty years that the Hammers have won the FA Cup, it’s “time to be great again” this season, isn’t it? That’s what we thought after the 2018/19 “transitional season”, which now would surely be followed by one more step forward for the Club.

And, after an inevitable defeat to Manchester City in the first game of the new season, things really seemed to turn out very well for West Ham when they had a run of six games in which they remained unbeaten with three wins in the Premier League and one in their first game of the League Cup. What a promising start into this anniversary season that was, 40 years after the Irons’ last win of the FA Cup!

But then our seemingly talismanic goalkeeper, Lukasz Fabianski, the fabulous shotstopper and Hammer of the Year 2019, got injured, and West Ham suddenly found itself in a downward spiral which Manuel Pellegrini was unable to stop. His substitute goalie Roberto who had been brought to West Ham by Pellegrini and his director of sports Husillos, instead of former fans favourite Adrian, proved completely unable to cope with the task of playing in the Premier League. He was a factor of highest uncertainty that also unsettled the defenders in front of him. With West Ham’s defence a complete shambles the Hammers shipped goals after goals! Four goals were conceded from minnows Oxford United, and West Ham’s exit from the League Cup against this third tier opposition was followed by a dismal run of seven league games with Roberto without a win. At last Pellegrini decided to hand the club’s third keeper his Premier League debut, and David Martin found himself between the sticks against Chelsea.

It was a dream start for the 33 year old, son of former Hammers center back Alvin Martin: He kept a clean sheet at Stamford Bridge, helping West Ham win 1-0 away against the Blues. He broke into tears after the final whistle and then sprinted up the stairs of the away stand to celebrate the win with his father, West Ham legend Alvin Martin, who was a member of West Ham’s Cup winning team of 1980.

But it was a short-lived upturn in West Ham’s fortunes, followed by just one win within the next five games. Pellegrini seemed utterly clueless, he looked an old man in the dugout who had completely lost the dressing room, being unable to coach his team, and making strange substitutions which nobody could understand…

Instead of a step forward the Club now made one back, fired MP after an other defeat to Leicester City by the end of December, and reappointed David Moyes who had saved the Hammers from relegation in 2018. Then the Scot had not been found good enough to remain the Club’s manager and had been replaced by Chilean high-calibre manager Manuel Pellegrini.

Moyes’s start into his second reign at the London Stadium was all but perfect with a 4-0 home win over fellow strugglers Bournemouth, but the shape of the squad he inherited is simply not good enough to restart a season which really has been a desaster so far. The FA Cup win at Gillingham was followed by a league defeat at Sheffield United (with a controversial VAR decision when West Ham’s equaliser in the last minute of the game didn’t stand because of Declan Rice’s completely unintentional and unavoidable handball in the build-up to the goal). The Hammers couldn’t climb up the table, and now they find themselves as seventeenths just above the relegation zone, separated from the eighteenth only by goal difference. They have also been eliminated from the FA Cup by former Hammers coach Slaven Bilic’s West Brom.

With a very bad home record this season we have to fear the worst when this Saturday’s must-win game against Brighton is played at the London Stadium where the Hammers have won only three games out of thirteen so far this season.

Therefore the West Ham faithful hoped that “transfer deadline day” which coincided with Brexit Day had to be a day to provide some hope Hammers who had only welcomed Czech midfield player Tomas Soucek (24) from Slavia Prague within this window so far. And it really went down to the wire: just minutes before deadline West Ham got their second new player, bringing in versatile attacker Jarrod Bowen from Hull City

23-year-old Bowen, who scored 54 goals and added 14 assists in 131 matches for Hull, has signed a contract until the summer of 2025.

Manager David Moyes said: “I think he could be a big success. When you score goals like he does, and in the numbers he does, in the Championship, it will give you a great chance of scoring goals in the Premier League.”

Well, that was good news from London at last. I hope more good news will be coming today when West Ham United play Brighton & Hove this afternoon!

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