Where were you when we were shit?

So Joe Cole is a West Ham player once more. If ever proof were needed that this club is more concerned with reputation than results, style rather than substance, then the reaction to the prodigal son’s return to Upton Park provided it.

“Like discovering a long-lost relative,” claimed Mirror journalist Dan Silver. “It does feel like some of the wrongs of the recent past have been redressed.” Meanwhile, an article on goal.com claimed: “Most, including myself, are deliriously happy … It is equally about who Joe Cole is and what he represents.” These were not isolated sentiments. On Thursday, Twitter was flooded with grown men eagerly posting photos of Cole in his new West Ham training kit.

Football fans are entitled to indulge in a bit of sentimentality, but Cole’s time at the club is hardly one to look back on wistfully. I say this as someone who is the same age as him, and who as a teenager in the late nineties watched on with envy and admiration. Nevertheless, the idea that he “represents” anything mystifies me. His time at the club was an era of decline.

He featured in two games during the successful 1998/99 season, the peak of Harry Redknapp’s tenure as manager. Over the next four years the club slid steadily towards the second tier. In 2000 and 2001 we finished ninth and then fourteenth, before Redknapp was relieved of his duties. By this time Rio Ferdinand had already been sold to Leeds while Frank Lampard moved on to Chelsea, indicating that, far from propelling the club to the next level, the Academy was more of a production line for which West Ham bore the risks, while our rivals Chelsea and Tottenham would reap the rewards.

Cole was very vocal in his support of Glenn Roeder succeeding Redknapp, an appointment which effectively sealed the club’s fate. A seventh-place finish in 2001/02 masked the underlying problems. In terms of points, West Ham were closer to Everton (15th) than Chelsea (6th). The following season we were relegated.

There was no blame to be shouldered by Cole, though it was bizarre that surrounded by players such as Paolo Di Canio, Freddie Kanoute, Jermaine Defoe and Michael Carrick, his efforts proved fruitless. Sam Allardyce’s Bolton survived at our expense – deservedly so. Cole got his dream move to Chelsea, the team he supported as a boy. While he was off winning Premier League trophies, the rest of us made do with watching the likes of Andy Melville, Adam Nowland and Brian Deane battle it out against Gillingham.

Cole was a good servant to West Ham and deserved a move to a club that could provide him with the money and success that we couldn’t. But after seven years of watching him in the blue of one of our bitterest rivals, you will forgive me if I scoff at the idea that there is anything romantic about him returning to Upton Park now that his best years are behind him and Liverpool are desperate to rid themselves of him. The only alternative offer Cole had on the table was from QPR.

If I am unable to share the passion that many of my fellow fans have displayed this week, it is because I choose to save it for those players who – while Cole was winning trophies for Roman Abramovich – were plying their trade for my team, you know, West Ham. Players like Christian Dailly, Mark Noble, Carlton Cole, Kevin Nolan. Not very romantic, admittedly, but there you are.

“I hope I can give the club a few memorable seasons,” said Cole this week. That is what I hope for, too. Under Allardyce the club has much-needed stability and potential. If Cole can play a part in that, then great. I also do not doubt that his affection for West Ham is genuine. But it is ominous that in the last four and a half seasons he has completed a full 90 minutes only 13 times in the league. Players who struggle with injuries during their twenties do not tend to shake them off in their thirties.

I was at the Reebok Stadium in April 2003 when Allardyce’s Bolton beat West Ham 1-0, pushing us a step closer to relegation and effectively hastening Cole’s exit from E13. A key part of Allardyce’s success that season was teaching a few old dogs – Jay-Jay Okocha, Youri Djorkaeff, Ivan Campo – new tricks. If he can do for Cole what he did for them, this week’s euphoria may not be as misplaced as I fear it to be.

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