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
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