West Ham Are A Bit Of A Mess Right Now: An Investigation
Slaven Bilic could lose his job soon. With Crystal Palace and Leicester City already having dumped their managers that leaves West Ham as the next likely candidate… after Ronaldo Koeman at Everton, of course. Does Slaven deserve to get the flick? Well they’re not doing too well right now but, nah, probably not. But the way the Premier League is going these days it seems like if you ain’t in the top six then you’re playing to avoid relegation. Crystal Palace just beat Chelsea, there’s no obvious relegation candidate. West Ham cannot afford to get sloppy here.
And yet they just got pumped 3-0 at home against promoted Brighton & Hove Albion. The score didn’t really reflect the game, arguably – the Hammers had close to 65% of possession and took 16 shots compared to 7 for the Gulls. 10 corners to 3. They should not have lost this game 3-0 under any circumstances but they fell asleep on an early set piece, conceded on the break after giving the ball away cheaply right before half-time and then, with quarter of an hour left, they gave away a blatant penalty.
Which means West Ham have now only won twice from nine PL games. Sir Alex Ferguson’s theory that the league table is irrelevant before November still stands – they can win next game and jump up towards mid-table – but right now they’re lingering around the relegation zone.
Bilic has a lot of credit in the tank amongst the fans. He’s a former West Ham player and a passionate kinda bloke who ‘understands the West Ham way!’ Obviously that’s a myth (and a nice bit of marketing) but don’t forget he also took them to the brink of the top four in his first season, that legendary final year at Upton Park. It all did plenty for Bilic’s reputation. Skip forward a year and a half though and it really doesn’t look like they’ve gone forward at all since Sam Allardyce left.
Just look at the highlights from the Brighton game. All those shots they took? Only two were on target. They whipped in 41 crosses and only seven were won by players in claret jerseys. They’re pretty good at the back, better than their record suggests, but their midfield is weak, their fullbacks don’t overlap and there’s not enough movement going on up front. Doesn’t that sound like Big Sam Football to you?
The difference is that Sam Allardyce knows how to make it work and Slaven Bilic, right now, does not. It’s pretty harsh that the Hammers players are being ripped for their effort and energy in that game – a disjointed game plan and demoralising results tend give that impression but you’re taking the piss if you think guys like Pablo Zabaleta, Winston Reid and Michail Antonio don’t care. Perhaps those extra icing-on-the-cake desperation plays are missing, sure. However that’s more down to a confused team than an apathetic team.
Here’s a stereotypical example of West Ham building up an attack. You’ll just have to trust it isn’t taken out of context, (watch the damn replay, mate – I literally picked it at random from the middle of their dominant stretch). After winning a loose ball from their own goal kick, the ball was passed back to Joe Hart in goal. It went to Fonte, it went to Zabaleta, who pushed it forward to Antonio who had about an inch of space just to be able to pass back to Zab. It goes across the backline, over to the left and back again. Pedro Obiang switches it to Zabaleta…
Zabaleta is able to draw his man in and get past him, a rare bit of empty space for a WHU player to run into all game. He takes advantage of that by curling in a cross from about parallel to the edge of the penalty area (just as Jose Izquierdo was closing in on him – safe to say the 25 year old Colombian is a lot faster than the 32 year old Argentinian). Antonio takes a swing at the cross but misses it, Hernandez is able to take it down on his chest and the shot’s blocked.
That was the height of West Ham’s creativity all game. Take another look at that screenshot and see where all the players are. To allow the fullbacks to get forward, the central defenders get wide and the holding midfielder sits in. That was Obiang most of the time, he’s the one passing the ball. Except that the fullbacks didn’t really get forward. Arthur Masuaku and Zabaleta tried 15 crosses (Zab’s deliveries were the best of any of them) but basically none of them were from behind the defence – it was almost like watch Winston Reid’s All Whites at times.
So that’s the defensive shape, now take a look at the massive gaping hole in the midfield where nobody is. That’s because Cheik Kouyate was partnering Obiang in the middle but he may as well have been playing as a second striker/winger half the time – trying to do a Fellaini, basically. It was pointless and he was subbed off at half-time. Then you’ve got the guy who should have been there, Manny Lanzini, dragged deep and dragged wide trying to get involved. Oh and Marko Arnautovic playing as the left winger/attacking mid and doing next to nothing all game.
Lanzini and Antonio are their best creative players. West Ham can’t afford to be wasting Lanzini and if their only plan in possession is to get the ball wide and cross it in then that’s exactly what they’re doing. Javier Hernandez is a slight looking joker but he’s a better hold-up player than a lot of people realise, good at playing on the turn. Hit him at his feet a few times and let Lanzini run off him from the middle, maybe give Antonio the chance to run in behind without having to dribble past a guy.
Andy Carroll was suspended for this game and that obviously should have affected how they planned to play but instead it was still get it wide and cross it in, over and over. Hernandez is also quality in the air – remember that backwards header he scored for Man United? – but he’s short, man. And he was up against Shane Duffy and Lewis Dunk, each of them a good 192cm tall. Chicharito is 175cm tall. He can’t jump 17 centimetres higher than Duffy & Dunk can jump so simply sitting up a cross for him is a waste of time. Plus those two defenders have come up from the Championship – they know how to deal with that stuff. Put in a cross with the defenders already committed/conflicted in their defensive actions and Hernandez has a chance. Yeah… didn’t see much of that.
Hernandez deserves some blame for his performances. He’s still scored 3 goals in 9 games though, he could be much worse. Same with Carroll’s supposed importance. The big fella hasn’t scored a goal yet this season… although they have won two of his four starts. If he’s crucial to them it’s because he suits the way they play and if Hernandez is struggling it’s because they aren’t adapting to him.
Arnautovic is a funny one too, his transfer didn’t make a lot of sense at the time – if your new record signing’s departure is met with shrugs by his old club then that’s a clue - and so far he’s been awful for West Ham. What’s more is that he came in to replace Robert Snodgrass who was sold after six months having also been rather crap for the Hammers. Chose to go to Aston Villa in the Championship instead, one of the clubs he rejected to sign for West Ham in January.
Robert Snodgrass: “I was coming on against City and [Bilic] said: ‘Where do you want to play, on the left or right?’ I thought: ‘You have just signed me and I have played on the right or behind the striker at Hull City all season’. That was my debut and alarm bells were ringing right away. I found it very strange and I realised from the off that it wasn’t going to happen. Every time I played I was on the left. I don’t know why he did it.”
Snodgrass came in as a Dimitri Payet replacement. If you wanna take that 2015-16 success and boil it down to one factor then that would be Dimitri Payet. A player who could create something out of nothing, who had one of the finest set piece deliveries in the Premier League. He left in ugly circumstances and West Ham simply haven’t been able to replace him. With the Frenchman (who’s been dead average for Marseille, btw) they could be a compact and simple team because he busted things wide open and without him the goals have shrivelled right up.
The good news is that Jose Fonte has come good and is growing into a fine partnership with Winston Reid. Pablo Zabaleta has been decent too – although he gave away the penalty, the silly bugger. Obiang has some potential and Antonio is just a fantastic player to watch. As is Lanzini on his day.
Yet Joe Hart’s not been so great. Hernandez should come good but Arnautovic already looks like a big mistake. They booed him when he was subbed off. If you look at the 13 players who played against Brighton, including subs, then only Reid, Kouyate, Obiang, Antonio and Lanzini were even at the club in 2015-16. One more reason why things look static and clumsy.
Maybe that’s how they somehow managed to concede a simple goal from this situation…
It’s almost ironic, isn’t it? Slaven Bilic next takes this team across town to play Spurs in the League Cup before skipping further across town to play Crystal Palace in what might be a must-win… because after that they play Liverpool. Watford (A), Leicester and Everton (A) are all tricky contests and then they begin December with games against Man City (A), Chelsea and Arsenal. Co-owner David Sullivan said he’d only consider sacking Bilic early if things get drastic. Right now they’re not. Pretty soon they could be… or they could pull off a couple quick 1-0 wins and be tenth before they play City. You never know, they’ve done it before.
Honestly, don’t discount them beating Liverpool. That’s the kind of opposition that the Hammers are way more suited to playing against. Brighton sat deep with two compact lines of four and withstood everything. Liverpool are more fluid than that. They press hard in their 4-3-3. West Ham don’t have to bring it against a team like that, they can be the ones sitting back and hitting on the break, unleashing their attacking players into the kind of space they could never manufacture against Brighton.
What’s weird is that you looked at their line-up for that Brighton match with Hernandez and Lanzini and Arnautovic and Antonio and it appeared to have all the fluency and pace and creativity that they’d need already. It’s the disconnect between that appearance and West Ham’s reality that’s the real problem here.
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