On Wednesday night an Upton Park-bound District Line train dithered at a red light for the umpteenth time. A West Ham fan commented: “This driver must be a Millwall fan”. A Stoke fan responded: “No, it’s just Avram Grant taking you nowhere”.
In the context of an excitable group of football fans such quips always seems funnier than they actually are. I welcomed it as much-needed comic relief. Normally when I despair of our predicament people tell me that West Ham are too good to go down or that Avram Grant knows what he's doing. The Stoke fan’s sentiment chimed much more with my own misgivings.
I never thought I would describe a game of football as cringeworthy but that’s the best way I can describe the first hour of what turned out to be a very good cup win. Players, most notably Kovac and McCarthy, just didn’t seem to know how on earth to create an attack. I fear that if I ever meet Scott Parker I will fall to the floor, grab his ankles and beg him to never leave us. His impassioned goal celebration in which he ran straight to the fans suggests that, as ever, he is up for the fight.
Put simply, the turning point of the game was the substitutions:
Boa Morte (Behrami 72)
Kovac (Obinna 64)
McCarthy (Noble 72)
Jones (Gudjohnsen 58)
Mark Noble’s creation of the second and third goals was pure class, whilst Eidur Gudjohnsen gave us a timely reminder that his snub last January was no bad thing. Luis Boa Morte and Benni McCarthy were, as expected, truly awful.
A place in the Carling Cup quarter final is cause for celebration but even this cannot mask the underlying problems. A quarter of the way into the season and we are yet to leave the foot of the table. To avoid relegation our form over the remainder of the season will need to be similar to that of Birmingham City last season. As fans, we may have been here before but it doesn’t get any easier.
When I first decided to write a West Ham blog I had utopian intentions of keeping it consistently positive. Should we win at the Emirates I promise to post something more bubbly next week, but for the time being these are my five biggest gripes of the season so far:
1. Avram Grant describing us as being at the start of a long road
I don’t know if he has been watching too much X Factor but Avram has an unfortunate tendency to use his programme notes to describe the long journey that we are embarking on. In the Newcastle programme he wrote: “We are doing the right things and we want to continue this and we have a long way to go”. I have no problem with managing fans’ expectations but with every week that goes by it becomes increasingly evident that the reason for this arduous journey is that Avram hasn’t yet worked out what he is doing. Owen Coyle took over a pretty dire Bolton side last season. I don’t remember much talk of journeys, just a quick turnaround.
2. Scapegoats
Bolton, Sunderland and West Brom all find themselves in the top half of the table. Not because their players are infallible (Titus Bramble? Scott Carson?), but because they are well-organised, motivated teams. Carlton Cole is the first to admit he is not in the best form of his career. Robert Green has made a couple of silly errors. Labelling either of them as the source of all ills may be convenient but it doesn’t really scratch the surface.
3. Reduction in ticket prices
If those of us who have already shelled out the best part of a grand for a season ticket were not feeling disenfranchised enough, we now get regular bulletins telling us that non-season ticket holders can purchase match tickets for as little as £15. Aside from the obvious unfairness of penalising those who have committed up front to all 19 league games, the Davids may look back at this decision as rather short sighted. There are enough reasons not to renew without new ones being offered up.
4. The Apprentice (Karen Brady being the tenuous link here)
You go into the start of a new series of The Apprentice expecting to be impressed and entertained by a group of hyped-up individuals. Very quickly you realise your expectations were in vain as the realisation sets in that they are mostly woefully inadequate. If that is not a good analogy for supporting West Ham I don’t know what is.
5. Anti-Olympic Stadium sentiments
Stand in the rain outside Upton Park tube station for 30 minutes and tell me you don’t want to move to a ground next to a station on two underground and one overground lines, including direct links to Essex. Throw in the reduction in ticket prices which will be needed to fill a stadium of that size and you realise this really is a no-brainer.
You can now follow Love In The Time Of Collison at http://twitter.com/OnWestHam. As well as updates on new posts you can also follow my ramblings during the games starting with this weekend’s game at the Emirates.
I nearly forgot to mention the best response a West Ham fan could come up with to the taunts of the Stoke fan: “You’ve got some balls mate, I’ll give you that. Just a shame you won’t have them when you get off the train.” Oh, the camaraderie.
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