Under The Hammers

One of several players who have featured for both West Ham and Southampton is ‘old fashioned centre forward’ Iain Dowie.  In addition to scoring one of the finest own goals ever, in a League Cup tie at Stockport, Dowie’s legacy to football is the concept of ‘bouncebackability’.  Today is a chance for the Hammers to demonstrate their aptitude for resurrection as they travel to Southampton on the back of midweek humiliation at the hands of Manchester City.

Ask most West Ham supporters and they will be adamant that the Hammers are a far bigger club than Southampton, yet in reality they are currently part of a small group of teams, along with ourselves and Everton (plus Newcastle when they come back up), who have aspirations of nicking that spare Europa League spot and enjoying the occasional jaunt into Europe.  Southampton have the appearance of a very organised and well run club with a modern compact stadium, excellent training facilities (I wonder how Jose Fonte compares them to our own Rush Green base) and a recruitment system that has shown great stability in an environment where talented players and managers have come and gone in search of what they felt were greater things.

“They have some new players and some injuries, and it will be a tough game for us and for them.  It is an important game because we are only one point above them and we want to make that gap bigger.”

– Slaven Bilic

Since experiencing severe financial difficulties and entering administration, in the wake of the Redknapp curse, the Saints have demonstrated their own bounceback proficiency and during the past five seasons they have pipped us for automatic promotion from the Championship and finished above us in three of the last four Premier League seasons.   The current manager and team have not pulled up any trees in the League this season but have still managed to make it to the League Cup final.

Head to Head

Matches between West Ham and Southampton date back to the Southern League in 1899 with a first Football League Division 2 encounter taking place in 1922.  Since then there have been a total of 95 games of which West Ham have won 35, drawn 28 and lost 32.  The record away from home in 48 matches is won 10, drawn 16 and lost 22.  West Ham have yet to win at the St Mary’s Stadium which has seen 3 defeats and 4 draws in 7 games,

The last win on the road was a 3-2 success in November 2000 with goals from Kanoute, Pearce (S) and Sinclair.

Team News

Very few of the players who turned out against Manchester City have reason to qualify as the first name on the manager’s team-sheet this afternoon.  However, with a fairly limited number of viable juggling options available to him it is likely that the manager will plump for the largely similar personnel once again.  Cheikhou Kouyate has returned from the ACON and would be straight back in, for his athleticism alone, if I was picking the team .  Reports suggest that Sam Byram may be doubtful with a hamstring injury and so it could be a return to a back three with either Kouyate or James Collins linking up with Winston Reid and Jose Fonte.  If Kouyate is selected in midfield expect the manager to do this at the expense of Pedro Obiang, who despite being our best player for most of the season will be penalised for his poor show on Wednesday.  The more reasonable decision would be to bring in Kouyate for Mark Noble who looks to have even more treacle in his boots as each week goes by.  Robert Snodgrass will surely start in place of Sofiane Feghouli.

“We know this team, they have come back well in the table lately. They are a good opponent with confidence and we have to play a strong game.”

– Claude Puel

Interesting to see what type of reception Fonte receives from his former supporters and whether he is able to help the coaching team plot Southampton’s downfall.  Fonte was quoted as saying that the players did not follow the manager’s instructions during the midweek game and hopefully he can provide some on-field leadership in that regard.

Southampton are missing leading scorer Charlie Austin and best player Djik Van Dijk and with doubts over Rodriguez and Ward-Prowse they are close to what a fromer manager might have called the ‘bare bones’.  Bertrand and Tadic always seem to play well against us and manage to exploit our generosity on the flanks.

It is improbable that we have been able to address the lack of relative fitness in our squad over the past three days but it is fingers crossed that we go into the match with some sort of game-plan that is then executed with hard work, effort and commitment.

Man in the Middle

A rare Premier League appointment today for Graham Scott from Oxfordshire.  Scott’s only previous encounter with the Hammers was the League Cup defeat at home to Aldershot in August 2011 when he sent off Callum McNaughton, playing his one and only game for West Ham.  In a total 19 games this season Scott has awarded 67 Yellow and 3 Red cards.

We move on to game twenty-four in our topsy-turvy season. We have a trip to the St Mary’s stadium on the south coast to face a Southampton side whose season has been just as inconsistent as our own. Anybody who saw them beat us convincingly 3-0 in the sixth game of the season, at which point they had a five point lead over us in the table, would be surprised that they now sit one place and one point below us in that congested area which sees Stoke in 9^th place on 29 points and Bournemouth in 14^th on 26. We are 11^th on 28 points, at a midpoint of nine points below Everton who currently sit in our finishing place last season (7^th), and nine points above the drop zone.

It is highly unlikely that we can improve enough to move upwards to finish 7^th as we did last season, and improbable that we can implode to finish in the drop zone either. So mid-table obscurity is the order of the day, and an exit from cup competitions means that we have little to play for other than pride, and to finish as high as possible to earn financial rewards that are based on finishing positions.

Realistically, based on our performances to date, our final finishing position is very likely to be somewhere between 9^th and 14^th, so the six clubs in that band, Stoke, Burnley, West Ham, Southampton, Watford and Bournemouth, separated by just three points, are in a mini-league hoping to finish at the top (i.e 9^th). These six teams can perhaps be considered to have performed the most inconsistently this season, and all six have lost more games than they have won, without being that bad to be considered relegation candidates.

The prize money for a 9^th place finish is £24 million, and drops by £2m for each position, down to £14million for finishing 14^th. The difference of £10 million is sufficient to buy you another solid Premier League footballer (such as Robert Snodgrass, for example) who will help you to retain a mid-table position the following season, but not enough to buy any players to take us to the next level.

So the games against the other five teams in my mini-league take on added significance, and we have yet to play all of them for a second time this season, and the first of these games is on Saturday. We have already met all five of them at home, so they are all away games between now and the end of the season.

Our opponents on Saturday have beaten seven teams so far, Swansea, Burnley, Everton, Middlesbrough, Bournemouth and Leicester, in addition to ourselves. By the middle of December they had only lost five times, but a very poor run since then has seen them lose five of their last six league games. Their only win in that time was a 3-0 win over Leicester in their last but one game.

Of the six aforementioned teams in my mini-league, only Burnley and Leicester are still in the FA Cup, although Southampton have performed well in the EFL Cup to reach the final where they will take on Manchester United at the end of February. It is surprising to me as to how many of them fielded weakened teams in the FA Cup competition this season. None of them were in a position to challenge for a European place, and none of them were likely to be involved in the relegation dogfight. Surely they owed it to their fans to try to win the FA Cup? Fans will remember a visit to Wembley to contest the FA Cup final for years to come, but they won’t remember the difference between finishing 9^th and 14^th in the Premier League. We can exclude ourselves of course. We put out a strong team but were still battered by a rampant Manchester City team in the third round!

So what will happen when we take on one of the other “inconsistent” teams this weekend? To be quite frank I haven’t a clue. Based on current league form since around mid-December, we have performed better in our last eight games than our opponents, winning five of them to their two victories. But for many of those we weren’t that impressive, but nonetheless they were victories. On the other hand Southampton will remember their victory at our place earlier in the season.

We were both promoted to the Premier League in 2012 and have met nine times since then. We have won three times (all at home), they have won three (including two at our place), and three have been drawn (two of them goalless). We last won on their ground in November 2000, more than sixteen years ago, when goals from Kanoute, Stuart Pearce, and Sinclair, helped us to a 3-2 victory.

The smart money (according to the bookmakers) is on a home win, with Southampton odds-on to collect three points. I hope that we can prove them wrong and win there for the first time in a long while, but realistically I predict a 1-1 draw, replicating the score in the game in April 2013, and an important point against one of the other teams in the race to finish 9^th! On that day less than four years ago, Andy Carroll scored our goal, and he is the only player in our team from that day who is likely to face the Saints on Saturday. How times change. Other players in the starting line-up that day included Jaaskelainen, Demel, Diame, Nolan, O’Brien, O’Neill, Jarvis, Tomkins and Vaz Te, all long gone. The only other starter on that day who could possibly play is James Collins, but I suspect he will be on the bench.

Thankfully the transfer window has settled safely back in its frame for another few months and attention can return in its entirety to action on the pitch, even though I suspect the ghostly tones of “We’ve got Payet” will reverberate around the cavernous stadium and in the media for several weeks to come.  It turned out to be a pragmatic window for the Hammers, rather than an exciting one, and much still rides on the continued fitness of Andy Carroll, the only remaining credible striker option in the continued and long running absence of Diafra Sakho.    I was encouraged to hear Carroll say that he was now conscious of picking his battles on the pitch and that he no longer felt the need to try to win every ball; hopefully this should serve to minimise the stresses and strains on his body.

Blah, blah, blah, Dimitri Payet, blah blah blah…..

– Slaven Bilic Press Conference

The closing of the window is unlikely to shut out all of the noise about ‘two-bob’ ‘penny-pinching’ owners but in the context of mid-table obscurity (with an outside chance of Europa League in the event of extraordinary planetary alignment) it is better to keep the ‘war chest’ safely buried until the summer, when there is better value and greater options.  The majority of supporters will not remember a making-up-the-numbers January signing when it comes to scrutinising and comparing future summer investment.

Today’s visitors are one of the few clubs where transfer budgets are meaningless and for whom the odd £50 million thrown around is simply loose change burning a hole in the pocket of a dishdasha. They were quiet this window (unless you count £27 m Gabriel Jesus who was signed in the summer but has only recently arrived) but their net spending for this season still exceeds £150 m.

I am always torn on match-days between a natural, but understated, optimism for a West Ham victory and a litany of reasons why just now is a bad time to be playing this week’s particular opposition.  The recent indifferent run by the Blues and the resultant media focus on Pep’s performance are the anxieties that will gnaw away at my confidence and create growing pre-match-tension as kick-off approaches.

Head to Head

It is a mere 3 weeks since our last encounter with City at the London Stadium when once again the head to head advantage clicked a further notch in their affluent direction.  We have won just two of the last 16 meetings between the two clubs.  In the recent FA Cup tie it was difficult to determine to what degree the final outcome was the result of City’s brilliance or the Hammer’s pitifulness.  Either way it will require one of those special ‘obscene’ all-hands-to-the-pump displays if we are to take advantage of an early opportunity for revenge.

Team News

The injured are still injured, Andre Ayew is busy scoring penalties at the African Cup of Nations and Cheikhou Kouyate continues to queue at Heathrow immigration.  According to the Physio room both Andy Carroll and Mark Noble have knocks but are expected to recover.  It is the manager’s style to keep the same team and formation until we lose a game and so, with the exception of Jose Fonte in for the injured Angelo Ogbonna, I expect to see the same line-up that started at Middlesbrough.  Personally, I would put Snodgrass straight in at the expense of Feghouli but he will most likely be introduced from the bench at two-nil down.  If I owned a hat then I would offer to eat it if either Feghouli or Calleri ever make it as regular Premier League players.  There is a story that Brian Clough once went to scout a player but left after the warm-up because he didn’t like the way he ran; well that is how I view these two, neither of whom look like top-flight footballers – not that I would compare my judgement to Cloughies – and clearly Bilic has seen something he likes about them in training.

“He’s so important, we’ve played a lot of games without him, and I’m happy he’s back.  He’s not an aggressive player. He’s tough. He’s one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met. We accept the ban and don’t complain.”

– Guardiola on Fernandinho

For Manchester City, there is good and bad news.  The bad news is that Kompany is fit again, Aguero has recovered from injury, Fernandinho is available after suspension and everyone else is available.  The good news is that only 11 can be on the pitch at any one time and that one of them is likely to be Claudio Bravo.

The Man in the Middle

For the first time this season we’ve got a Friend in the shape of Kevin from Leicestershire.  A comparative stranger to West Ham games, the single coming together last season was in the historic away win at Liverpool where he erroneously sent off Mark Noble.  In his total of 21 games this term Friend has flaunted  73 Yellows and 1 Red card.

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Manchester City began the season as the bookmakers’ favourites to land the Premier League title. The arrival of Pep Guardiola, who many saw as the best manager in world football, was considered to be a master stroke, and many felt it would ensure that the title returned to the Etihad Stadium. But, despite six wins on the trot in their first six games of the season, which shortened their odds of finishing at the top, they have since been inconsistent for a team destined to win the league. On paper, those first six games did not appear to be the toughest, apart from perhaps a visit to their Manchester neighbours. But they won them all relatively comfortably, scoring eighteen goals in the process and conceding just five.

But in their next sixteen games they have suffered five defeats at the hands of Tottenham, Chelsea, Leicester, Liverpool and Everton. More worryingly perhaps, for a team who had high hopes, they have had four draws at home against Everton, Southampton, Middlesbrough and Tottenham. Had they won those four they would be sitting comfortably in second place, just four points behind the leaders, Chelsea.

But as it is, with just sixteen games of the season to go, they find themselves two points outside of the top four places, and with a fight on their hands to qualify for a Champions League place next season. Their cup performances have been more consistent, and despite being eliminated from the League Cup by their neighbours, they have progressed to the fifth round of the FA Cup where they have an away tie at Huddersfield, and to the last sixteen of the Champions League where they will face Monaco.

Of course they have already beaten us twice this season, 3-1 in the league at the end of August, and then the 5-0 thrashing in the FA Cup third round on our ground. In the league game, despite City scoring twice in the opening twenty minutes, we fought back with a goal from Antonio in the second half, and it took a goal in added-on time to finally seal the three points.

Guardiola has been criticised for his choice of goalkeeper to replace Joe Hart, and has been very touchy when interviewed on this subject by the media. Some statistics (on shot stopping) put Bravo, their keeper, near the bottom of the league of Premier League custodians, but of course the figures cannot take into account the quality of the shots that he has faced. Nevertheless the general consensus is that his performances have not been of the quality needed for a team hoping to win the title, although some blame must also be attached to their ageing defence, who have missed their captain, Kompany, for almost the whole of the season. This is one area that I hope we can exploit in the game. They have conceded 28 goals in their 22 league games, a figure that exceeds the four teams above them in the league, as well as four teams below them, including Middlesbrough who sit in sixteenth place!

Their attacking play, when it is on song, as it unfortunately was in the cup game here, is entertaining to watch, and their 43 goals scored (more away from the Etihad than at home!) is only bettered by the current top four. But their seven wins, four draws, and five defeats in their last sixteen league matches emphasises their inconsistency, and we shouldn’t go into the game fearing a repeat of the cup drubbing a few weeks ago. In fact our current league form, with five wins in our last seven league games, is far superior to their four wins in their last nine league games. On that basis, the bookmaker odds on offer, where we are quoted as around 5/1 to win the game, and City at around 2/1 on, would appear to be wide of the mark, but of course the two games where we have faced each other this season tell another story.

Nonetheless it is to be hoped that the apparent improved spirit following the removal of a certain Frenchman from the team (and now his subsequent departure), will mean that we can at least get something out of the game. With my trusty optimistic hat on I am hoping for a narrow win, perhaps 2-1, although a 2-2 draw may be a more realistic bet.

It will be interesting to see the team that our manager selects. Randolph will be in goal, and I expect a back four of Byram, Reid, Fonte and Cresswell. Kouyate has returned from the African Nations Cup, but whether he returns directly into the team is open to debate. For me, Obiang, Lanzini, Carroll and Antonio are certain starters, and he will almost certainly pick Noble. Of course new signing Snodgrass will be pushing for a place in the starting line-up as will Feghouli. Unfortunately Diafra Sakho is unlikely to be available until March, and it remains to be seen if we sign a striker on deadline day (I am writing this the day before). Bilic appears to have cooled on the prospect of signing Hogan from Brentford (I wonder if he really fancied him in the first place, perhaps hoping that Sunderland would part with Defoe?).

Now that Payet has gone for a reputed £25 million, we have money to spend, but I am uncertain as to the wisdom of doing so; perhaps we should wait until the summer now that we are virtually safe from getting involved in the scrap at the bottom end of the table? However many of our fans on social media are still desperate for a striker and a right-back. Calleri’s deflected goal will probably keep him in the squad, but he hasn’t convinced many yet (apart from the manager perhaps?), and Fletcher is perpetually on the fringe (surprisingly seemingly behind Calleri in the pecking order?).

And I’m not sure our manager could pick a right back based on his history (Antonio and Nordtveit don’t do it for me in this position). It was good to see that Martinez scored within minutes of coming on for his debut at Oxford. It was a well-taken goal, and he certainly looks a fine prospect. But then so does Reece Oxford, but he hasn’t been given a chance yet either! And I haven’t mentioned Fernandes who is another that I like.

I wonder if we will bring anyone in on deadline day tomorrow? Perhaps the long-awaited marquee signing? I won’t hold my breath.