EXTRA TIME

Leggy Irons Outclassed

April 10, 2022 at 4:45 pm Leave a comment

Three days after West Ham’s heroic fight that earned 10-men-Hammers a 1-1 draw against Lyon, the Irons lost 0-2 away to Brentford. In a game in which they never reached their usual standards, Brentford was by far the better team, and goals from Mbeumo (48’) and Toney (64’) were enough to see off leggy and uninventive Irons.

It was Brentford’s fourth win in five games, one of them a 4-1 away win at Chelsea last weekend, but the defeat didn’t dislodge the Hammers from the top six as Manchester United (0-1 to Everton) and Wolves (0-1 to Newcastle) also lost. West Ham can continue their bid to make it back into Europe next season, though Tottenham seem to have cemented their fourth place with winning 4-0 against Aston Villa, and West Ham couldn’t capitalise from Arsenal’s defeat to Brighton.

On top of all the problems  with their display the Irons were also hit by an injury to Kurt Zouma which presumably will demand a scan before we know the score for Thursday night.

The reality of this game demonstrated that, like the Spurs match after Sevilla, the squad is being stretched to limits which we can only hope and pray won’t be too much for them. Not having signed a single player in January was always going to haunt the Hammers, and the defeat against Brentford was just another example. West Ham will hope Declan Rice and his team mates will shake off their tiredness and be somewhat sprightlier at the Grand Stade de Lyon on Thursday.

Somehow the situation reminds me of the 2014/15 season, the last season in which Sam Allardyce managed the Hammers: the Irons (for whom Alex Song, on loan from FC Barcelona, was playing this season) had performed very well in the first half of that season and even had been in third place for one week after twenty games. But then, due to a lack of investment in the January window, the Hammers lost game after game, were humiliated in the FA Cup with a 0-4 defeat at West Brom, and their season petered out (with only two wins from 17 games). The Hammers only finished 12th in the Premier League and, of course, didn’t qualify for Europe.

I am not saying that this will happen again this term, and of course the Hammers have achieved so much more in the last and the current season with qualifying for the group stage of the Europa League, winning their group and reaching the quarterfinal of the European Cup for the first time since 1980/81! They still have a very good chance to eliminate Lyon in the return leg on Thursday. However, there is a feeling that it could have been so much better and easier for this team if they had done something in the transfer market in January! There even had been a chance to make an emergency signing of players who were released from Ukrainian clubs due to the war between Russia and Ukraine, but unlike Olympique Lyon, West Ham unfortunately again was not active in the transfer market.

Anyway, come on you Irons! In football everything’s possible, and there’s so much to play for!

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