It will be sad to say goodbye to February. After Jannus Horribilus, February was the month that just kept giving. Four wins. No draws. No defeats. 19 goals were conceded in January, compared to just one in February.
This schizophrenic change in form has led to much confusion among fans. There are those who took to social media (or Twitter as the most of us call it) to repeatedly call for Sam Allardyce’s head, who are now unsure of what to do with themselves.
There is a Twitter account called @fatsamout which spent January tweeting abuse about Allardyce as well as rather more emotive stuff like “Heartbreaking to hear these West Ham fans on Talksport”. Yeah, forget Ukraine and the floods – it’s the Hammers fans you’ve gotta feel sorry for. Nowadays @fatsamout just moans about how boring clean sheets are.
More problematic is those fans who did their best to maintain loyalty and avoid being just another fickle football fan, but who caved sometime in January. It was indeed a very miserable month with some miserable results, but how frustrating to have turned into a knee-jerker just before it all started to get good again.
I have absolutely no issue with anyone wanting Allardyce sacked, whether it was before or during January. I spent two years wanting Glen Roeder sacked and one year wanting Avram Grant sacked. Loyalty is all well and good, but not to the point that you’re not able to think for yourself.
Even I, a couple of weeks after writing a pro-Allardcye blog at the start of the year, when questioned on the KUMB podcast after the Newcastle defeat as to whether I thought Allardyce should be sacked had to admit that if he were replaced by a genuinely better alternative I wouldn’t have much sympathy for him (But I did also say that Kevin Nolan was being harshly treated and would come good when he had a striker to play off, so there).
What did surprise me was the number of people who so quickly turned on both Nolan and Allardyce after a couple of bad months in the midst of as bad an injury crisis as we’re likely to endure. Had they not done enough in the previous two years to be given some benefit of the doubt? The answer – as confirmed by chants of “Fuck of Sam Allardyce” at Craven Cottage and the Etihad – was no.
Tenuous tune of the week: Bob Marley – Redemption Song
It's not all bad being a West Ham fan. How many other supporters can say their club has been graced not once, but twice by Iain Dowie? And don't you feel proud to say yours was the first English team to win the Intertoto Cup? I know I do. But sometimes I feel like every time we take a step forward we quickly do a 180. It is as though there is an unwritten law that says that good news on the pitch and good news off the pitch must remain mutually exclusive.
The international break should have presented a chance to pause and reflect on an unlikely three straight wins. Instead, Ravel Morrison's transfer to QPR this week has exposed some ugly truths about the way our club is run.
Daniel Taylor wrote an article for last weekend’s Observer, claiming that Ravel’s disquiet at West Ham was driven by Sam Allardyce and Kevin Nolan’s incessant badgering of him to switch agents to Mark Curtis.
The story may be a bit one-sided. It seems a strange reason to leave a club and I am not convinced that “everyone at West Ham can confirm he has knuckled down”. It is fantastic that he’s found himself a girlfriend but, in the same way I don’t care about the private life of Olivier Giroud, I’m not about to look favourably on Ravel just because he chooses to stay in with his missus and watch Splash.
If we ignore the link that Taylor has made, there remain two deeply unsatisfactory stories here: the loss of a player with the greatest potential since Carlos Tevez and the concentration of power around Mark Curtis.
Even if we take the view that Morrison’s rise and fall is all his own doing – which I don’t – it still remains another blot on the West ham copybook of acquisitions. A lack of effective signings in the summer could be forgiven on the basis that we had rightly placed our faith in the next big thing. In Ravel’s absence we are left with a huge lack of creativity and inspiration.
Andy Carroll can’t stay fit. Ravel Morrison lacks discipline. Mohamed Diame can’t be bothered. At what point do we stop bemoaning our bad luck and recognise that there is something inherently wrong with our strategy?
Which leads us on to the other side of Taylor’s story: Mark Curtis.
The Observer article did not tell us much more than we already knew, but it was refreshing for such a big issue to be brought into the public domain. In case you did not already know, Curtis, Sam Allardyce’s agent, represents or has close links to the following West Ham players:
Kevin Nolan
James Tomkins
Jack Collison
Matt Jarvis
Andy Carroll
Jussi Jaaskelainen
Adrian
Joey O’Brien
Guy Demel
Any fan who does not worry about such concentration of power being held by a football agent so close to the manager is being naïve.
I don’t work for a football club but an equivalent scenario could arise at my company. Except it wouldn’t. We would never let it happen. It is a huge conflict of interest on Allardyce’s part which gives rise – wrongly or rightly – to accusations of personal gain. There should be a clear segregation of duties which means that Allardyce’s recruitment policy is solely focused on the best interests of the club without the interference of any other considerations.
That so many players who belong to Curtis have signed for the club and other existing players switched allegiance to him cannot have happened without a concerted effort on the part of Curtis and others within the club. It makes it very easy to believe the claim that Morrison was badgered on “an almost daily basis”.
Since the club have chosen not to refute the story, I will ask the question: What is Kevin Nolan doing trying to persuade Morrison – someone by all accounts he does not get on with – to switch agents? I can think of many things I would like Nolan to work on. This is not one of them.
Whatever version of events you choose to believe, there is no satisfactory explanation for any of this and, as always, no happy ending. If you ask me, the whole thing stinks.
Tenuous tune of the week: Tame Impala - Feels like we only go backwards
West Ham announced this week an agreement to sell Upton Park to London developer the Galliard Group. Such an announcement was an inevitability given we are due to move into a new stadium in two years, but that did not stop an outpouring of grief from a large section of supporters.
Not only am I happy to be moving to the Olympic Stadium, I am more than comfortable with saying goodbye to the Boleyn Ground. Though it will be sad to no longer see James Collins whacking aimless long balls on the pitch that Bobby Moore once graced, sometimes in life you just have to move on.
Here are the ten things I will miss the least.
Catering staff
Catering staff is probably the wrong term. I’m not sure what the word is for an east London teenager who stares at you like you’ve just asked him to name the first 50 digits of Pi, needs to ask for assistance in making a cup of tea, pours the tea over himself, doesn’t know where the lids are (they’ve run out), gives your tea to someone else, can’t work the till and gives you the wrong change. He also charges you £1.20 for a Yorkie, but that’s not his fault.
One chip shop between the tube station and the West Stand (where I sit)
I know what you’re thinking – couldn’t you just eat before you come out? Sorry, but if I’m going to the football I want to eat some good-quality junk food. There is also a chip shop behind the Bobby Moore Stand with a queue, such as the one on Green Street that snakes halfway down the Barking Road. But unless you arrive more than an hour before kick off, your pre-match build up will largely consist of standing in this queue. Of course you may do something else before the game such as visiting the ticket office or club shop in which case your pre-match build up will largely consist of, er, standing in a queue.
Upton Park tube station
Yup, you guessed it – queues. It’s not just before the game that’s the problem. Unless you leave the ground before the end of the match, you will be joining a scrum of people jostling to make it, not into the station, but to the back of the queue. East Ham aside, the alternatives – Canning Town, West Ham – cannot be reached on foot much under 40 minutes. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people leave the ground before the end of the match to save time. How many times have you heard the tedious chant of ‘Is there a fire drill?’ from the away end. The sight of fans filing out of the ground cannot be particularly inspiring for the players.
Those stupid bloody castles in front of the West Stand
This is a place of football, not Disneyland.
The bogs
The toilets are a good size for a large pub, not so good for a football stadium that holds 35,000 people. The cubicles – of which there are probably fifty in the entire ground – can be used for a poo up until about 2.30pm on matchdays, after which point smokers and people who like to piss all over the seats have priority.
The East Stand
I know, I know – the Chicken Run, the history. In years gone by the fans in the front rows were right on top of the players, an undoubted bonus against weaker-willed opposition. But with that competitive advantage now gone, the stand just makes the ground look disproportionate – like Elland Road or Filbert Street.
Treatment of away fans
Not one match goes past when, as I walk from the tube towards the West Stand, I don’t see away fans walking in the opposite direction with disgruntled looks on their faces. At first, I assumed they were just dissatisfied with the service they had received when trying to buy a onesie from the club shop. It turns out, of course, that there are no signs outside the tube station explaining to away fans the convoluted and not at all obvious route they need to take to get to their side of the Sir Trev Stand. There are other nice touches laid on such as charging over £50 for the privilege of visiting E13 as well as not bothering to read out their team’s line up. I’m not an avid reader of the bible but, as someone who has visited dozens of grounds as an away supporter, I do go along with that “do unto others” stuff.
Positioning of the away fans
And yet and yet … once they are in the ground, where do we locate them? Do we tuck them away in an upper tier out of harm’s way, St James’s Park style? Along the side of the pitch away from the goals, as per Villa Park, Goodison Park, etc. No, we stick them right behind the goal. We have conceded more goals at home than away so far this season. 63% of opposition goals at Upton Park have been scored in front of the away fans, with free-kick takers (Leighton Baines, Jermaine Pennant, Yohan Cabaye, for example) appearing particularly relaxed when scoring their inch-perfect winning goals.
The big gaps either side of the East Stand
A bit too Britannia Stadium.
I have seen some right old shit in that ground
I have no problem with sentimentality but let’s not get too rose-tinted glasses about this. Yes, this stadium (or the stadium as it once was) has been graced by Bobby Moore, Trevor Brooking, Billy Bonds and many more legends. But most people attending matches in 2014, myself included, do not remember all that. I am old enough to eulogise Paolo Di Canio, Julian Dicks and – just about – Alan Devonshire. But for every great performance featuring such a player there were ten other nightmares.
John Fashanu steamrollering us in our first Premier League game; turning a 3-0 lead into a 3-4 defeat (more than once); some absolute hammerings (0-4 QPR 1993, 1-4 Aston Villa 1995, 1-5 Leeds 1999 … ); countless failed attempts to beat Millwall; drawing with Farnborough; nearly losing to Emley; losing to Wrexham; half a season without victory under Roeder; the Crystal Palace match that was called off halfway through when the floodlights went out ...
The fact that it keeps drawing me back
Hundreds of times. To paraphrase Thom Yorke, the Boleyn Ground, full of accidents waiting to happen, is like a siren singing us to shipwreck. In that sense, nothing really compares to it.
To West Ham fans arbitration is a dirty word associated with Sheffield United’s persistent attempts to prove that one player, and one player alone, was the reason West Ham escaped relegation in 2007. Their fight was successful in as much as they were compensated to the tune of £25m, but you won’t find many people outside of the red half of Sheffield holding this up as a victory for football.
Football is not a black-and-white game. Pundits can agonise over slow-motion replays for days and still not reach agreement on whether the right decision was reached by the referee. A process exists where red cards can be challenged retrospectively with the potential of overturning a player’s suspension. Once that decision has been made it is in the interests of football as a whole that everyone abide by the decision and move on.
It is therefore a big source of embarrassment to me that my football club is attending an FA tribunal today to challenge the decision not to rescind Andy Carroll’s red card and subsequent three-match suspension.
The club cite a lack of “procedural fairness”, which is to say that the panel making this decision should exist of more than three people – or as many people as it takes for West Ham to get the decision they want. Perhaps there should be more heads on the panel, but that’s something that needs to be changed at an objective point in time (such as at the end of the season), not off the back of an emotive issue. David Gold’s comments betray that the appeal is borne out of desperation.
“If we were mid-table we would probably get on with it, but we are fighting for our lives to retain our Premier League status,” he explained yesterday. In other words, we might as well appeal as we have nothing to lose. This sentiment won’t curry much favour with the FA.
What troubles me further about this appeal is that it’s not even as though Andy Carroll was wholly innocent. For what it’s worth I don’t think he should have been sent off but the reality is that he deliberately swung his arm in the direction of Chico Flores with the result that he hit him on the head. Flores is a cheat and an embarrassment to his club, but we knew that already. Carroll was, at best, naïve.
The real reason we are all so angry is because of Flores’s playacting. Had Howard Webb sent off Carroll without this playacting – which admittedly he may well not have – then I doubt we would be appealing the decision so vigorously. To campaign for retrospective action for feigning injury is something worth fighting for. But that is very different to what we are doing.
After a week in which we took four points from six, there should be an upbeat mood amongst players and fans alike. Instead, the atmosphere is of impending doom, brought about by the reinforcement of the notion that without Andy Carroll we are nothing.
The real crime in all of this is that we have such a one-dimensional, unbalanced squad that we cannot create goals without Carroll in the team. Would we go to these lengths over the suspension of any other player? If we focused more on those things within our control, this whole issue would not exist.
Having argued on numerous occasions over the last six years that Carlos Tevez was not solely responsible for keeping us up in 2007, I refuse to be a hypocrite and argue that Carroll’s suspension will cause us to go down in 2014.
Principles aside, the negativity and victim mentality that comes with the appeal does not do our club any favours. I doubt many Sheffield United fans see their club’s victory in the courts as compensation for their downward spiral which could see them playing League Two football next season.
Let’s have faith in our ability to avoid relegation this season. And if we don’t stay up, let’s take a look at ourselves first when apportioning blame.
