It's the midfield, stupid

The transfer window really shouldn’t be as intolerable as it is. Football fans taking pleasure from gossiping about which player is going where is hardly a new phenomenon. I remember as a kid in the early 90s devouring a Shoot magazine article predicting exactly which clubs would sign which players over the course of the coming summer months. It was great. But the effect of Sky Sports News and the ITK cretins ramming it down your throat every January has been to make unfounded speculation take precedent over any of the action that actually occurs on a football pitch. So let’s hear no more about it, and turn our attention to on-the-field matters.

A run of one win in 11 means that even members of the Big Sam fan club such as myself are starting to feel a little nervous. Seven of the next eight matches are against top-half teams. Wins are required in home matches against the likes of Swansea (tomorrow) and West Brom, otherwise we face a run-in of six-pointers against Southampton, Wigan, Newcastle and Reading.

We remain in a position that we would have taken at the start of the season: 13^th and seven points clear of the relegation zone. Beat Swansea tomorrow and all that’s required to beat the drop is a couple of wins and three or four draws. Anyone who had hoped for a comfortable top-half finish this season gets full marks for optimism and zero marks for an understanding of this club’s limitations.

Going forward – both in terms of the future and in an attacking sense – there are grounds for confidence. Andy Carroll is back and if he starts playing like an £80k/week striker should, West Ham fans will be rewarded for their patience. Supporting him are Kevin Nolan, Matt Jarvis, Joe Cole, Mark Noble and Mohamed Diame, with Jack Collison and Ricardo Vaz Te in reserve. I wouldn’t be foolish enough to say that team is too good to go down but, let’s be honest, there are far more inferior midfields in this league.

It is tempting to draw the conclusion that our achilles heel is therefore our back four and that having failed to strengthen in January, we will continue to leak goals. This is a conclusion that is reached by default, not by examination of what’s really happening. Winston Reid has been the player of the season. James Collins, though guilty of some howlers that have cost us dearly, is for 99% of the time a strong centre half. Joey O’Brien and Guy Demel are not the best full backs to grace the Premier League but they are perfectly competent. Sadly for them, they make good scapegoats.

Anyone who looks beyond black-and-white stats will know that you defend as a team. That’s all 11 players, not just the back four and goalkeeper. At times Andy Carroll takes this literally by dropping into defence to clear up long balls, but what is more important is that the midfield remain disciplined and act as a shield for the defence and pick up the runners. Perhaps the defence should have coped better at the Emirates, but why on earth were they put in a position where Arsenal could create four goalscoring opportunities in ten minutes? At the start of the season the midfield was an asset, but the last time it was really effective was at St James’s Park in November. So what’s changed?

Diame’s injury was obviously a big setback. But even since coming back from injury he has lacked discipline and has been much more prone to bomb up field leaving the defence exposed. In the first half of the QPR match Loic Remy and Adel Taarabt looked like they would tear us apart again and again. Kevin Nolan now plays as a forward rather than a central midfielder. There is little, if any, link up play between him and the more defensive midfielders, Noble and Diame. Noble seems to be compensating for Diame’s attacking instincts by planting himself permanently in front of the back four. It’s a role he can do, but it leaves little room for him to express himself as a creative midfielder.

The transfer window has reduced so much of football analysis to simply what players each team should sign. Sign these players and you’ll stay up. Fail to shift these players and you’ll go down. If the worst happens and West Ham do drop out of the Premier League, it will have very little to do with what we did and didn’t do in the transfer window, and a lot to do with the organisation of a group of Premier League-quality players. I think Allardyce knows how to put this right. I think we’ll be fine.