EXTRA TIME

Two months to go: PL Fixture List Released

June 19, 2024 at 4:42 am Leave a comment

West Ham United will not play a Premier League game outside London for the first three months of the 2024-25 campaign.

A quirk of the Premier League fixture list means West Ham’s new manager, Julen Lopetegui, will not need to make overnight travel plans until his side visit Nottingham Forest on Nov 2.

Instead the Spanish manager and his first new signing, 18-year-old Brazilian starlet Luis Guilherme, will be quickly acquainted with the passion of London derbies. West Ham’s first four away games involve trips to Crystal Palace, Fulham, Brentford and Tottenham Hotspur. Lopetegui starts at home to Aston Villa and faces four more home games before heading to Forest.

The Hammers‘ final game of the season will be away at newly promoted Ipswich Town on 25 May 2025. Kieran McKenna’s Ipswich achieved back-to-back promotions, becoming the fifth team to do so, and were promoted as runners-up of the Championship to end their 22-year absence from the top tier. Their relegation had come one year after a very successful 2000/01 season finishing fifth, earning their manager George Burley the Manager of the Year award. The “Tractor Boys” were relegated from the Premier League in 2002 alongside Leicester and Derby County. Bizarrely, despite their relegation, Ipswich’s disciplinary record this season was the best of the teams that hadn’t qualified for European competition via league position, thus giving them a second successive UEFA Cup campaign for the following season after England received one of the three additional slots awarded through the UEFA Fair Play ranking.

In that season Arsenal made history by accomplishing their third double, their second under the reign of Arsène Wenger, and West Ham finished seventh under their then manager Glenn Roeder in 2001/02.

However, the next season also ended with relegation for West Ham, when Roeder was diagnosed with a brain tumour in April 2002 and West Ham’s 42 points from a 38-game season, a record for a relegated team, weren’t enough to save the Hammers (who were coached by caretaker manager Trevor Brooking for the final games of the season). But West Ham’s absence from the top flight didn’t last as long as Ipswich’s: the Irons were promoted to the Premier League after two years, winning the 2005 play-off final against Preston North End with manager Alan Pardew at the helm, courtesy to a Bobby Zamora strike. After ensuring promotion, Pardew said, “It’s a team effort. We defended well and we’re back where we belong.”

This very year 2005 my revived support for West Ham United started and culminated in beginning to write the RapidHammer blog in 2007.

Come on you Irons!!!

Entry filed under: Uncategorized.