Newcastle United 3 - 0 West Ham (And Other Ramblings)

"Omnes relinquite spes, o vos intrapten"

- Dante Aligheri

Sure, Dante might have had a decent crack at describing hell, but he never watched West Ham lose at Newcastle. 

***

Where does one even start? What can I write about this game that hasn't already been spewed forth and vomited up on every West Ham forum already? How I can honestly detail my feelings about this performance without simply repeating things I have been saying for months? 

Worse still, I am at a loss as to how I can actually try and entertain people - which I do realise I am purporting to do in offering up my work here for public examination - when I haven't felt this disconsolate about the present and future of my club since Avram Grant was in charge. How do I give you anything approaching the unvarnished version of my opinion without encouraging those who already claim I hate this club that I follow everywhere and devote hours of my life to writing about?

I'm not asking for sympathy, by the way, but more openly questioning quite how many more times I can chastise the manager for his ineffectiveness and the board above him for their complacency in assuming that the problems at the club are happening in spite of them and not because of them, and still hope to retain a readership.

But what else is there to think when watching games like this? Here was a West Ham team apparently chosen by a fucking Magic 8 ball and playing with all the cohesiveness of The Beach Boys at a family dinner. 

I'll take Perez, you take Ritchie and you take Mitrov- fuck

This absurd start to the season is just another waypoint in the series of crises that the club lurch between on a constant basis. First the team has to play all their opening league games away from home, then the overpriced £10m January vanity signing is gone after 15 games as he bemoans never being played in his correct position, then the vaunted new £40m big name transfer breaks down, then the managers position is put under review and then it was Bank Holiday Monday so everyone took a day off because constant unceasing stupidity is tiring. 

This nonsense barely even registers any more. Remember the halcyon days of six weeks ago when we made a teenager the Managing Director of the West Ham Ladies team or when the chairman told everyone that no kids would ever break into our first team? Pfft, that shit is old, yo. In the Def Con 4, constant Code Red world of West Ham the sad fact is that this week is barely a ripple on the surface of the permanent shitstorm that engulfs the club. 

***

So, what of this match? A confession. I was driving through France as it was being played. At one point I was under the English Channel where, I regret to tell you, West Ham still cannot defend. 

The television highlights doubtless don't give up all the secrets of this game, although I rather fancy that nothing positive has been hidden from me. The same problems persist as have done for months. The team cannot defend, the personnel are changed like bandoliers in rapid fire M60 machine guns to no obvious effect, and if there is a plan to score it is apparently so secret that it has yet to be shared with any of the players. 

This was the day the music stopped, the lights came on and the full gory truth was dragged blinking into the harsh glare of reality. Newcastle are quite possibly the worst team in the division not named West Ham, and they beat us so easily that the man of the match was Ciaran Clark, a footballer that bad he was once let go by Aston Villa. Mocking the Toon is ludicrous of course, seeing as how they polished us off like Neil Ruddock with a Gregg's pasty, but I'm sure you'll allow me some gallows humour.

Every manager has a landmark game where it ends. Irrespective of how much longer he stays, this is the end for Bilic. The fans have turned and once that happens nothing will ever be the same. Where once he offered hope and forward progression from the interminable boredom of watching Allardyce's teams, these constant defensive capitulations have dulled the ardour of even his most fervent supporters. 

Whether it manifests itself immediately inside the ground is a different matter, but it's all simply a matter of time now. I would have fired him last season after the Arsenal away game, but he earned a stay of execution with the Spurs victory. That typically short sighted thinking from the Board has given us (yet) another lost pre season, transfer window and now seemingly another year of struggle. 

Simply put, there is nothing left to believe in. Belief has turned to equivocating and now to the sad, reluctant realisation that nothing is changing. And when you don't offer hope to fans of mid table teams, you offer them nothing at all. 

To pick an arbitrary point, in 2017 we have played 22 league games with the following record:

Played	22
Won	6
Drawn	5
Lost	11
Goals For	26
Goals Against	41
Points	23

Allardyce was fired for that sort of turgid, dire output and few were sad to see him go. The circumstances were different, of course, but the fact that our support have chosen to romanticise Bilic's association with us doesn't change the bare facts that his teams are awful and have been for a while. That Spurs victory isn't so much papering over the cracks as filling a hole the size of the Grand Canyon. 

Enough. So long Slav, and thanks for all the fish. 

***

But wait, I hear you cry. Are you seriously suggesting that we're going to struggle all season on the strength of three away games? Well, yes and no. I'm actually suggesting that on the back of our results going back a lot longer than that, but also simply on the strength of history. There have been 28 teams in the Premier League era to have started the season with three defeats. Here they are, with a big shout out to 2017/18 for providing three terrible teams:

Club	Season	For	Against	Goal Difference	Finished
Leicester	2001/02	0	10	-10	20
Wolves	2003/04	1	10	-9	20
Swindon	1993/94	1	9	-8	22
West Ham	2010/11	1	9	-8	20
West Ham	2017/18	2	10	-8	?
Middlesbrough	2001/02	0	7	-7	12
Southampton	1998/99	2	9	-7	17
Wimbledon	1996/97	0	6	-6	8
Aston Villa	1997/98	0	6	-6	7
Wigan	2005/06	0	6	-6	10
Crystal Palace	2017/18	0	6	-6	?
Leicester	1994/95	1	7	-6	21
Blackburn	2009/10	1	7	-6	10
West Brom	2002/03	3	9	-6	19
Bolton	2002/03	2	7	-5	17
Newcastle	1999/00	3	8	-5	11
Bolton	2007/08	3	8	-5	16
Portsmouth	2009/10	1	6	-5	20
Southampton	1993/94	1	5	-4	20
Southampton	1997/98	1	5	-4	12
Bournemouth	2017/18	1	5	-4	?
Sunderland	2005/06	2	6	-4	20
Bolton	2009/10	2	6	-4	14
Stoke	2010/11	2	6	-4	13
Blackburn	2011/12	2	6	-4	19
Southampton	2012/13	4	8	-4	14
Wimbledon	1992/93	2	5	-3	12
West Brom	2011/12	2	5	-3	10

Now the good news here is that we are a highest new entry in this particular table and have now provided two of the worst starting teams in the Premier League ever, gang. And they said we'd never amount to anything.

Another cracking Sullivan and Gold decision

We have actually begun this season worse than the Sunderland team of 2005/06 who were so bad that if they'd have sacrificed a member of 5ive for every game they won we'd still have two of the fuckers left alive today.

What this chart tells us is that if we stay up we'll be the first team to do so with a goal difference this bad this early in the season. On the other hand, none of those teams played all their games away from home so that needs to be factored in as well and realistically this is still a sample size too small from which to draw any meaningful conclusions.

As such, what the more optimistic of you may wish to note is that only 10 of the 25 teams shown here went down. It strikes me that we could very easily win our next two games and pull away to finish twelfth and you can look back at this column and laugh at my over reaction. 

What probably is true, however, is that those pre season dreams of our new super-duper-glacially-slow-but-it-don't-matter-cos-they-are-well-experienced team pushing up to challenge for a European place are already dead in the water. Only four of these teams finished in the top half, and none of them defended like they were drunk.

***

It's a difficult task to make sense of this team. Blown away and seemingly clueless at Old Trafford, they rallied superbly at Southampton when all seemed lost. Claims that Bilic had lost the dressing room seemed spurious as the team showed all the fortitude that had been missing the week before to come within a Zabaleta brain fade of stealing a point. I don't think there is much doubt that he's lost his UEFA Tactics Manual but I'm not sure Bilic has lost the support of his players. They seem to genuinely care, even if they don't seem to understand what it is he wants them to do. But then a week later, awful again.

What can't be denied is how our basic default position seems to be one of general cluelessness. Our problems begin in the back four where our centre backs are so slow that the only way we can really guarantee a defensive base is the 3-4-3 formation that allows us to flood the central area with bodies.

Against elite teams, however, that doesn't tend to work because they press high and without a top level ballplayer in either central defence or midfield we have no way out. Think back to those maulings at the hands of Manchester City for evidence.

The significant problem with the 3-4-3 however, is that Pablo Zabaleta can't play as a wing back anymore and Aaron Cresswell is a pale shadow of himself. I am beginning to wonder if he didn't actually die in that pre season game in Germany and what we're watching is just a reanimated version of him, brought back by the Night King to wander idly around on our left flank and possibly kill a wildling or two.

Any chance we can have Aaron back please?

Elsewhere, James Collins played well in midweek against a Cheltenham side who are literally the second worst team in English football and thus was immediately restored to the starting eleven at the behest of West Ham Twitter. I respect Collins, love his willingness to throw himself in front of anything for the cause, but also accept that at 34 years old he shouldn't be playing regularly in the Premier League. Check out his defending for goals two and three. He looks like a remote controlled car being operated by a two year old, going in weird directions for no obvious purpose.

The only reason you might have missed this was because you might have been asking yourself where Pablo Zabaleta was for these goals. The answer is fucking miles away. Maybe he was over next to Sam Byram giving him all this advice that I keep hearing so much about.

While the defence is largely shambolic, there is also a problem in front of them. Our defensive midfielders don't seem to have any clear idea of their roles and both Obiang and Noble have looked way off the pace so far. Best of them has been Declan Rice, making it even more of a shame when he was caught in possession here for the first goal. Weirdly, Lanzini did exactly the same thing for the second and didn't get anywhere near the same level of public opprobrium. In both examples, it should be pointed out that there were several subsequent phases of play before the ball ended up in the net. Our ability to transition back when we lose possession like that seems to be almost nil, not least because our only players with any pace are attacking players with no interest in defending.

Whilst Rice was unlucky, I don't buy into the notion that Bilic was wrong to remove him at half time. You don't keep professional footballers on the pitch to massage their egos or soften the blow of their errors. Rice is a young kid and will learn, but Bilic had a game to win. It may not have looked like it but he was attempting to get us back into the game and the idea that the manager who gives a young player his debut is hanging him out to dry by substituting him seems deeply flawed to me. I absolutely guarantee that Slaven Bilic rates Declan Rice more highly than you.

Ahead of them we rotate our endless cast of players with obvious physical skills and talent and no clear position. Ayew plays wide and then through the middle, Fernandes plays everywhere but in goal and manages to look good whilst not contributing anything and Michail Antonio rotates between playing wide and up front, with no obvious suggestion that these movements are related to anything being done by anyone else in claret and blue. Chicharito signed as a fearsome goal poacher and after three games I am reduced to wondering if our sole plan for getting him the ball is to concede endless amounts of goals so he can take kick offs.

It's a mess. A terrible, long gestating mess that cannot possibly be a surprise to anyone who has watched our slow decline over the last calendar year. Watching all of this only serves to reinforce the notion that the thrilling 2015/16 season owed more than a little to the defensive base left behind for Bilic by Allardyce, and the rest to the mercurial talents of Dimitri Payet. The Frenchman dropped in Bilic's lap, motivated, in glorious form and capable of dragging his team to hitherto unheralded levels amid the weakest Premier League ever.

As soon as those circumstances changed, the Croat proved incapable of moving with the times, incapable of recreating that brio and verve once the music stopped.

***

All of which leads to the inevitable question of "what next"?

If I had to guess, I would say there is an existential crisis in the West Ham boardroom right now. Gold and Sullivan have a hard earned reputation for sticking with their managers through thick and thin and even away defeats to teams who literally cannot score against anyone else.

But the ghost of Avram Grant haunts them like a clueless, inept Israeli ghoul. By retaining Grant for the entirety of the 2010/11 season they condemned us to relegation. They are terrified of making that mistake again, although apparently not terrified enough to delegate a bit more of the decision making process to people who actually know what they are doing.

It would suit them down to the ground if Rafa Benitez could have his inevitable falling out with Mike Ashley over this international break, enabling them to have him installed by the Huddersfield game. Sky reporter Peter Graves even offers up some interesting commentary on the possibility. If that doesn't happen, however, it starts to look a little hairier. We know that the Board don't have the knowledge or imagination to make a progressive appointment, and it strikes me as unlikely that progressive managers would be queuing up to manage a club still being run in the same way as it was in 1980.

How do you fancy advertising my film about the Krays, Rafa?

All of which leaves us at the mercy of a Pardew or Hodgson style stopgap, each fulfilling the seemingly obligatory requirement to be famous enough that fans have heard of them, but not successful enough to be in employment currently.

But let's lay it all on the line here. Bilic isn't a cause, he's a symptom. One has to look deeper to ask ourselves why we are constantly having these same dark nights of the soul every few years.

Two weeks ago, David Gold gave an interesting interview to Moore Than Just A Podcast where he talked openly about a wide range of subjects. It's an interesting listen, and you'll like him a bit more at the end of it, as always seems to be the case with Gold.

But there is one section where he talks about the club transfer policy that only lasts a few minutes and yet caused me to lose my shit about five times in the process. The transcription, from Claret and Hugh, is as follows:

“We all have our opinions, We all have our viewpoints and we make them clear but in the main I’ve worked with David Sullivan for 30 years, we are like an old married couple, he starts a sentence and I finish it or the other way round. We trust each other, he’s got his role and I’ve got my role. The club is very fortunate in having David Sullivan on board in the way he does, he is a workaholic, he takes responsibility and I am a great admirer of him.”

Asked whether the board sit down formally to discuss transfer business Gold replied:   “We have chats, it’s very informal, it mainly it comes from Slav. Slav will give us a list of the players he is looking for and he will give a list of first, second and sometimes a third choice then it is up David (Sullivan) to get agents onboard because it is agents in the main that drive this. If you look over this summer, you can see how well it works. It is a tried and trusted system, it has worked nearly ten years we have been at West Ham and of course it worked for twenty years at Birmingham so if it’s not broken don't fix it.”

Asked whether the board brings in players themselves he added: “It is usually a young player that we bring in and we say to Slav 'Look we are bringing this player in, it’s not affecting your budget, this is the boards decision, we fancy this player, he could be a complete flop or he could be a superstar, we don’t want this to impact on you, your requirements have been fulfilled, this is something we are doing'. Call it an indulgence of the owners but our first requirement is to fill Slaven’s requirements, his targets, that is our first priority.

“If you go back to last season I can’t think a signing that wasn’t Slaven’s approval or requirement, if its a first team, if he’s put in a list of what he wants, they’re the ones David Sullivan and the team go out an pursue, please don’t feel this is any other structure.”

Now I don't know about you, but whenever I'm in a pub discussion about the greatest transfer policy of all time, the conversation always comes to a dead stop whenever anyone brings up Birmingham City circa 2001. It's just a huge relief to know that the transfer policy which managed to get Jesper Gronkjaer and Richard Kingson to St Andrews is alive and well at West Ham.

What's even more absurd about this is that Sullivan and Gold know all too well that business practices need to change or become rapidly obsolete. Sullivan made his fortune in pornographic publishing. I can't think of two industries forced to change their models in recent times more than porn and publishing. And what of Gold's Ann Summers stores? Twenty years ago they made their money through parties and in store purchases. Now, they sell in vast quantities online. The world has changed. Uber is the largest taxi company in the world and doesn't own a single vehicle. Airbnb is the biggest provider of accommodation in the world and doesn't own a property anywhere.

Put simply, it's not good enough to do something because that's how it's always been done. Wake up David - they didn't treat you with leeches that last time you were in hospital.

***

Leaving aside the fact that the phrase "tried and tested" apparently has a new definition, there is so much else in here to get your teeth into. The first is the confirmation that Slaven Bilic provides the transfer targets.

That'll be the Slaven Bilic who trains and prepares the first team, analyses the opposition, does all the media duties of a Premier League manager and then sits down to inexplicably pick Michail Antonio at right back. That Slaven Bilic. It rather seems like he already has a full time job, but there he is heading up our scouting department too.

The same Slaven Bilic who had his hip replaced in the summer.

The same Slaven Bilic with a newborn baby and young family.

That Slaven Bilic.

So, to be clear, the guy with the single most time consuming and important job at the club is doing the job of player recruitment in his spare time. I wonder how many Eredivisie games he sees, or how many MLS players he's scouted in person, or how long he spent in Uruguay before deciding we desperately needed Jonathan Calleri?

No wonder he looks so tired

***

Consider this for a moment. Who do you think is in the room when West Ham decide to buy a player? I'm guessing David and Jack Sullivan (we all know it happens), David Gold, Slaven Bilic, Edin Terzic, Tony Henry, Rory Campbell and maybe a low level analyst or two.

When the team lose 3-0 to Newcastle, who of that group is most likely to lose his job? I would say that is indisputably Bilic. So why, therefore, would the employee with the least available time, the most responsibility and the least job security be entrusted with spending a £70m budget? And what happens in the incredibly likely scenario that we lose at home to Huddersfield and a new manager arrives and promptly says that the squad has huge holes and big money needs to be spent in January?

Managers shouldn't be identifying players, they should be identifying specific needs and Directors of Football should be meeting those needs with players. The problem is that our Director of Football offers no direction and doesn't understand football. This is how you end up spending £20m on Andre Ayew when you need a right back. This is how you end up with Joe Hart when you need a winger.

It is now clear that the price of Sullivan and Gold investing in us was that the former wanted to play at being a football guru. It's also pretty clear that he has none of the contacts nor the experience nor the simple understanding of sport to do this. Answer me this - have you ever seen any football team make transfers look so difficult as West Ham?

And so we drift along aimlessly, forever condemned to a cycle of ineptitude because the people making the decisions about that direction never change.

Sullivan is the wealthy ship owner who decides to help out the captain of the Titanic and promptly crashes straight into an iceberg. He then commandeers the life raft and smashes it straight back into the same iceberg. As he comes to the surface he sees some driftwood, hops on top and sails that straight back into the same bloody iceberg. After resurfacing yet again he turns to the captain and says "I don't think much of the steering on these things".

It is, I think, the hardest thing a person will ever have to do professionally to admit that they are not up to the task. It's why I think Kevin Keegan and Nasser Hussain are English sporting heroes for pushing their respective sides forward by accepting that they could no longer do it themselves.

Sullivan must be a West Ham hero now. Bilic must go, certainly, but we will be here again soon enough if the whole structure at West Ham doesn't change. The roiling incompetence and institutional lunacy begins at the top and after nearly a decade we deserve better. Progress is impossible in this structure. We need highly skilled professionals with cutting edge thinking and adaptive practices to stand even the smallest chance in this competitive environment. Instead we have a businessman determined to live out his dream of being a Football Manager vicariously, and every single one of us is paying the price for that hubris, and for the weakness of his fellow chairman in playing along.

I know you've heard this all before. I know this is the same old diatribe with a fresh lick of paint. I know this is a broken record. But in the end, that seems apt. Today, after all, was the day the music stopped. 

Southampton 3 - 2 West Ham (And Other Ramblings)

It's impossible, it feels to me, to be able to accurately convey the feeling of being a West Ham fan to other people. We can try, certainly, but the reality is that all football fans are convinced they are on a rollercoaster journey of zeniths and nadirs that is unmatched anywhere else in the world. There are Manchester United fans who will genuinely look you in the eye and tell you without irony that it is agony supporting their team, despite the fact that the entire sport is geared towards making sure they win. That's just the essence of being a fan. We all need to feel it's a glorious test of loyalty.

A look that just screams "experienced, error free defending"

But this game... this game might just be the very essence of supporting West Ham. The perfect distillation of agony and ecstasy, bravery and incompetence, Hernandez and Fonte, stupid David Sullivan decisions and even stupider David Sullivan decisions. I want you to pull up a chair, sit down there, pull on your Robert Snodgrass replica top and let me tell you about the day that West Ham went to St Mary's and West Hammed the absolute almighty fuck out of this game of football. 

***

The story begins months ago, in March 2015, when Winston Reid signed a new six and a half year deal with the club. This would have taken him to his age 33 season which everybody knows is when centre backs are just about to hit their prime. Because of this our genius Director of Football, Professor David Sullivan, decided that we also needed to buy out another two years of Reid's career meaning that on the cusp of this game he signed yet another contract extension. This pointless endeavour now means that we get to pay Reid right the way up until he is 35 years old. Remember gang, long term planning is for wusses. 

The way you can tell this is a good idea, by the way, is simply by checking how many 35 year old centre backs started in the Premier League this weekend. None. Boy, it feels great to be a trailblazer. West Ham, ladies and gentlemen.

Anyway, flush with his new contract Reid promptly got injured in the warm up for this game because of course he fucking did. There is nothing more West Ham in the universe than new signings getting stretchered off, even when they're just contract extensions.

Into the team came Angelo Ogbonna, himself a recent recipient of a long term extension whilst recovering from an operation, who had been dropped after doing a passable impersonation of a kindly doorman at Old Trafford last week - "None shall pass! Except you! And you! Oh go on then, you too!". So one game into the season, half of the back four who had presumably been training together all pre season were out. We were rapidly approaching peak West Ham and the game hadn't even bloody started. 

***

It's been a bad week for statues in the South. In the US they are wanting to pull down these unmoving, rigid monuments to another time, and replace them with something more appropriate. At West Ham we just buy them from Southampton for £8m. And so it was that Jose Fonte had a first half here that could have been painted by Hieronymous Bosch, so hellish was it. 

Jose Fonte marks Manolo Gabbiadini for the opening goal

Despite having stocked up on cod liver oil before the start, Jose looked miles off the pace. Saints hadn't scored at home since April, but if doctors were going to prescribe treatment for such ailments this West Ham team would be at the top of the list. As such it took all of eleven minutes for Manolo Gabbiadini to run in behind the Portuguese and score the exact same goal he scored against us in February. On another day I might have questioned Joe Hart's positioning but until he plays with an actual back four in front of him there's no point making any judgements. 

Things somehow got worse from there as we looked hopelessly ineffective going forward and totally disorganised defensively. Southampton could have had a second before Marko Arnautovic - another of Professor Sullivan's new arrivals - decided that the only possible way to improve things was to elbow Jack Stephens in the face. It led to a deserved red card, and in reality is the kind of incident where the perpetrator can consider himself lucky to only get a three match ban. On a day when our new signings seemed to forget they were no longer at their previous clubs, the Austrian went full Stoke at the moment we least needed it. 

Arnautovic's lapse was so brainless that it would almost four minutes before any other West Ham player did something so stupid. This time, Fonte got himself the wrong side of Steven Davis and made up for it by dragging him down by the neck. It was a blatant penalty and even though Dusan Tadic - the worst penalty taker in the universe - took the kick it deflected off Hart and in. 

***

The first thirty eight minutes of this game were a painful dagger to the notion that this West Ham team is going to be different. On a day when the sun was broiling, and the heat was like a character in the action that needed to be acknowledged and factored into the plot, this was supposed to be the day our season started. Many fans were content to write off the opening day debacle at Old Trafford - you can't expect to win there, they said. If we can't expect to win there with a team bought and constructed with the sole purpose of winning right now then we'll never win there, I thought, but that's an argument for another day.

The weather was glorious. Players were returning. Hope was rising. This was the start. 

It should have been a home game, of course. If it had, you rather fancy things might have turned out differently. It's rare for teams to concede two penalties and have a player sent off in a home match, even in a stadium as sterile as ours. On another day, in our postcode, it is possible Tadic wouldn't have even been on the pitch to take his penalty. His early mistimed lunge at Hernandez might have returned a different colour card if fifty thousand home fans had been able to give their opinion on it. As it was, referee Lee Mason waved a yellow and cultivated the sense of injustice that seemingly led Arnautovic to remove his cerebrum. 

At 2-0 and a man down, it was impossible to see a way back. Only proper teams fight back from such situations. Teams who are organised, pacey and motivated can face such odds and defy them. This just isn't in the West Ham DNA, to be honest. In my thirty years of watching, such comebacks can be counted on one hand, like the number of actual jokes in the entire run of The Big Bang Theory. True West Ham fans were hunkering down, preparing for the worst. Maybe keep it to 4-0 against this team who haven't scored in 500 minutes and that won't be a bad result. We'll go again next week. We always do well at Newcastle, don't we?

And then, hope. 

***

Let's face it, if the first half of this game was everything shit about supporting West Ham, then the second was the reason we all go. This was a reason to believe. This was life affirming.

Michail Antonio has been out for months. He started this game, somewhat surprisingly but then between injuries and the failure of Professor Sullivan's January arrival - Snodgrass - we're a bit light on wide players. Antonio eased his way into the action, but when we needed him most he stood up like Ethan Hawke in Dead Poets Society. "Oh captain, my captain. I'll do your running". A man light, he simply took on the work of two men and began to carry the ball through the weak looking home midfield with energy and purpose. 

West Ham's second half. Fuckin' A

Our first came on the cusp of half time, when Antonio had no right to turn or shoot but managed to do both, and Fraser Forster parried weakly for Hernandez to score the kind of unremarkable but entirely necessary goal that it feels we have been doing without for years. 

At 2-1 down, there wasn't much more reason to believe than the simple fact that that's what we're supposed to do, but the second half was different in almost every way. Where we lacked cohesiveness and purpose we now had unity and ambition. Antonio was doing yeoman labour, but Hernandez was covering himself in glory too. Shifted to an unfamiliar left sided position he dutifully did his defensive work and when the time came, made slamming home the equaliser look far easier than it was.

The truth of that second half is that we were as good then as we were inept in the first. Young Declan Rice and Mark Noble held the midfield and Cresswell and Zabaleta coped manfully with the twin Southampton creative threats of Redmond and Tadic. Indeed, it was only when James Ward-Prowse joined the fray that the home side looked like being an attacking threat again. There was no pace to our play particularly - there can't be with such a slow team - but through repeated and persistent knocking on the door Cresswell and Sakho prised it open just enough for the Little Pea to slip through and give us hope. A comeback from absolutely nowhere, the kind to have you belting out "Bubbles" long into the night, and falling headfirst back in love with everything you believed when you first fell in love with football.

West Ham, ladies and gentlemen. 

***

Remember though, we're telling the story of West Ham here, a walking Greek tragedy of a football team. Whilst it's easy to blame the late lapse on some sort of lifelong gypsy hex, the reality is the team were exhausted by their efforts with ten men and a pre season fitness regime that seems to have produced a team in the image of Dawn French. It's almost as though playing German third division teams isn't great preparation for the Premier League. 

West Ham are about to salvage a point, you say?

And so it came to pass that a long, searching Ward-Prowse pass arced into our area with just seconds to go. The target was home centre back Maya Yoshida, who would have needed to have been Spiderman to have actually done anything with it. At that precise moment, it was possible to see why Professor Sullivan was so keen to sign 32 year old Zabaleta. The Argentine used all his experience to usher the ball out of play and shepherd us to an unlikely, but season launching point. Except he didn't. Of course he fucking didn't. 

I can see Zabaleta's point of view. He's been making that challenge for years at Manchester City and not getting pinged for it. Had he been playing for Manchester City in this game it wouldn't have been given. It was a marginal call, and when in doubt Premier League referees will always err on the side of a decision that won't be analysed for twenty minutes on Monday Night Football, or require a column from Jeff Winter in a newspaper. The problem is that games between West Ham and Southampton don't attract that kind of attention, so referees will just make normal, regular decisions. He's lost the protection of the Abu Dhabi millions. 

To call Lee Mason a cheat for awarding a penalty is to fundamentally misunderstand referees. They don't care who wins so long as they get an easy life. They're humans and so they act like humans. They get most things right, some things wrong and every now and again they can be influenced by large crowds. That's not cheating.

Would that penalty have been given for Southampton against Manchester City? No. Would it have been given at the Olympic Stadium? Less likely, but possibly. Would I have wanted it if it had been up the other end? You bet your life I would. We can't complain - Zabaleta just needs to remember who he's playing for now. It's the entire bloody reason we signed him, after all. 

After that, the penalty was taken by a player that Professor Sullivan publicly insulted last season, who promptly scored his first goal in nine months after our captain convinced him to put it the other side because Joe Hart knew what way he was going. West Ham, ladies and gentlemen. 

***

So what are we supposed to make of all this? I guess it depends upon how you choose to view results so far. If last season is a single, discrete event that you have wrapped up and parked on a shelf then I guess it is too early to make judgements. One away game against the best looking, most expensive team in the league and another where we played the majority of the game with ten men are no barometer of anything. Equally, our best player has yet to appear and as is customary at this time of year, we have plenty of injuries. Other teams hit the opening weeks at full speed, whereas we use them to get our players fit. It's little wonder we get off to such routinely awful starts.

But for those who see Bilic's reign through the longer lens, then this is all just the continuation of the same old stuff. Since we were last at St Mary's we've played 16 games and won 3. That's the sort of nonsense that got Allardyce fired, and he never had the kind of financial backing that Bilic is getting. More tellingly is that fact that we've kept only four clean sheets in that time, despite him playing three different goalkeepers, and at least seven different defensive set ups that I can remember. 

Guys, why is nobody defending?

Some of you will scream about injuries, as though this is somehow new or unique. Injuries are so endemic to West Ham that it is time to stop thinking of them as an unusual circumstance and instead accept that they are a simple fact for West Ham managers. Bilic will always have someone injured and so he needs to develop a way of playing that is less dependent upon individuals and more built towards the strengths of the group. I despised Allardyce's style of play, but I accept that he fashioned a system that meant players could come and go and not be confused by what they were supposed to be doing. Does anybody think our current system amounts to much more than "Oh well, Lanzini will be back soon"?

Having watched Bilic's teams for two seasons I have no idea how he wants to play. He asked for pace in his team this summer and got none, so now I don't know if he's a shill for the board or if he's changed his mind and he is happy having a side this pedestrian. We are lacking depth in the centre of midfield and yet Reece Oxford is off playing in the Bundesliga for reasons I cannot fathom. He doesn't seem to think either of his left backs are any good and signed a goalkeeper when he had a perfectly good one already. Perhaps the most obvious example of the totally disjointed thinking surrounding the club was spending £10m on Robert Snodgrass to replace Payet, replacing him with £24m Marko Arnautovic six months later and then banishing him from the squad altogether when he might have been very useful on a day like this one. He is currently being hawked round Championship sides with Professor Sullivan apparently bemused that his value has dropped so much in six months. Someone please explain to the Professor that perhaps the problem is he overpaid unnecessarily to start with. 

It's worth remembering all of that when you read about the board quibbling over a £5.5m gap in the valuation of William Carvalho with Sporting Lisbon. Perhaps if someone at the club - ANYONE - had more of an idea about squad building and transfers, we wouldn't have to worry about such a relatively small amount. 

***

In the end, I've landed here. I'm terrified about the parallels to 2002/03, but it's far too early to judge this particular team. If nothing else, Bilic is still clearly able to motivate his team to play for him, and that is certainly worth something. I think you have to give them ten games, the return of Lanzini and (I guess?) Carroll before making any firm pronouncements. 

But equally, saying "It's just two games" is disingenuous bullshit.  None of these problems are new  - none of them. Read what Rich Sprent had to say about all of this after the game on Saturday. The facts are dismal reading - 92 goals conceded in the last 50 league games played! How is that sustainable? £20m on Andre Ayew and still no obvious answer to where he should be playing? A sudden drop in net spend after years spent wasting it like a wedding planner? It's not really a surprise that the team play so incoherently when all around them is chaos.

I've been off the Bilic bandwagon for a while now, despairing of those many gutless surrenders against the top teams last season, but I'm not seeing any reason to jump back on it here. When he does eventually go, it will because of a myriad of reasons. A failure to stand up to the Board when needed, a misplaced belief that he could build a system around a player as unreliable as Carroll and probably the Payet thing too. But in the end, it will boil down to the simple fact that his teams have never, ever been able to defend. It's incredible considering his playing career, but there it is. A team managed by a centre half, that can look glorious going forward and like Gloria Hunniford defending. 

West Ham, ladies and gentlemen. 

In Retro - Trevor Sinclair

If the early Nineties was a test of faith for West Ham fans, then the second half of the decade was as near as we ever got to the promised land.

As I wrote here, Ian Bishop was the heartbeat of that earlier team, and while they undeniably afforded us many great moments it was the later squad who would actually climb back to the rarefied heights of the top echelons of the Premier League, and allow us the small satisfaction of being on the first page of the table when Match of the Day eventually bothered to sling it up on screen after 50 minutes of punditry on Manchester United and Liverpool.

For me, as a young teenager gradually becoming a young twenty-something, the nature of my football viewing was also changing. I still went to home games with my dad, but away games often involved friends and overnight stays in far off towns and cities. By 1998 I had left school, had my first job in the city, had disposable income and my first serious girlfriend. It was the best of times, and, really all I needed was for West Ham to finally give me something to repay my faith in them.

***

It is an oft overlooked point, but on the watch of despised chairman Terry Brown the club improved gradually from the wreckage of relegation in 1993 to being an established Premier League side. This was marked by incremental improvement everywhere we looked. Billy Bonds was replaced by Harry Redknapp, the North and South Banks were replaced by the odd looking but much needed Moore and Brooking stands, and on the pitch there was a noticeable upturn in the quality of players arriving.

The improvement had been gradual, and far more to do with Harry Redknapp and the riches of the new Premier League than the work of Terry Brown, but it was undeniable and particularly gratifying to this youngster who had spent the better part of my childhood being whisked off to the Goldstone Ground and Vale Park while staring wistfully at Highbury and wondering if we might ever one day compete there on a more equal footing. A look at our league finishes in this time tells a tale:

1990/91 - 2nd (Promoted to Div 1)
1991/92 - 22nd (Relegated to Div 2)
1992/93 - 2nd (Promoted to Div 1)
1993/94 - 13th
1994/95 - 14th
1995/96 - 10th
1996/97 - 14th

The club had begun the process of solidifying themselves as a fixture in the Premier League without ever truly suggesting that our existence would ever be anything other than a struggle. The Grim Reaper of relegation (he looks like Neil Warnock if you're interested) was a constant visitor, and was so comfortable at Upton Park that he had his own seat in the corner, next to Mr Moon.

For West Ham to progress there needed to be an upgrade to better players. With money flowing into the game through the new league and Sky riches, we had to shift our self image to a more upwardly mobile vision of ourselves. For me that moment came in January of 1998 when we signed Trevor Sinclair from QPR.

The Cockney Feghouli

As far as I was concerned, he was the one who changed everything.

***

The process of improvement began before this point, to be sure. Harry Redknapp might resent the "wheeler-dealer" tag but he was an astute enough manager to realise that he needed to change the type of player he had at the club. And so it was that Trevor Morley became an ageing Tony Cottee and then John Hartson. Colin Foster begat Marc Rieper who in turn gave way to Rio Ferdinand while Martin Allen morphed eventually into Frank Lampard. These were the early indications that we were taking steps beyond our stride.

The Nineties - when the Academy produced footballers

If the authorities couldn't convict Harry Redknapp for having a bank account in the name of his dog, they should have at least been able to get something on him for the Sinclair deal. The winger arrived in a swap for the genuine but limited Northern Irish duo of Iain Dowie and Keith Rowland and a couple of million. It was a stunning signing and a blatant robbery of QPR, indicative of the increased ambition at the club under Redknapp and a textbook example of how to improve your side and clear up squad space in one swoop.

Sinclair had achieved national fame with an incredible overhead kick for QPR a few years earlier, but had stalled somewhat as their star had waned. By the time he arrived at Upton Park he was 24 and desperate to restart a career of much early promise. His debut was at home to Everton and couldn't have gone much better if he'd found the Templar Treasure in the Chicken Run. He started up front - the beginning of a long career with us spent moving around the pitch to cover up holes in the squad - and scored twice. The first was a springing header from a corner, and the second a nicely composed finish after a powerful burst into the box. We didn't win, naturally, but a new West Ham star had joined the firmament.

The highlights of that game are here and feature a couple of notable elements. Firstly, Slaven Bilic is playing for Everton which seems like a rarity, and the Everton equaliser is scored by an extra from Game of Thrones.

The most noticeable immediate thing about Sinclair was his sheer physicality. Short, but stocky and powerful, he moved like a middleweight boxer. The Boleyn Beluga reckoned he had the biggest arse he'd ever seen on a professional footballer, but I think that ignored the explosive power of the man. At a time when better pitches and improved fitness were making inroads to the game, Sinclair was the first of a new type of player at West Ham. He was a pure, highly skilled athlete.

***

Sinclair exploded into the consciousness of West Ham fans by scoring 5 goals in his first 6 games. By now I was giddy with excitement. I had loved the team of Bishop, Dicks and Slater and believed fervently in the Hartson, Kitson and Potts group but to my mind Sinclair was in the vanguard of a giant leap forward.

A couple of years prior, our Academy had finally sprung into life after a decade long slumber and suddenly we had Frank Lampard and Rio Ferdinand to supplement our outside purchases. To my mind, however, Sinclair was a symbol - a message to other players, agents and clubs. We're not messing about anymore, this is the type of player we sign now.

Those first few games of his were instructive - Everton (H) 2-2, Newcastle (A) 1-0, Bolton (A) 1-1, Arsenal (H) 0-0, Man Utd (H) 1-1, Chelsea (H) 2-1, Leeds (H) 3-0. To West Ham fans of that era, this was a remarkable run. I'm not sure I'd have fancied us to win a single one of those games and yet we went undefeated. It was a moment of era defining change. That little run was a slaying of historic dragons and a public exorcism of old ghosts. Yep, to the 19 year old me, this was the call to arms I'd waited years to hear.

There was a metaphoric passing of a baton too, as Bishop played his last West Ham game in that 2-1 win over Chelsea. This was the only game I can find a record of the two playing together for West Ham, but I rather like the idea that there is even the most tenuous link between them and me.

From there, we surged forward to a fifth placed finish in 1998/99 as Ian Wright and Neil Ruddock joined the party to bring experience and, I don't know, a better class of goal celebration to the club. That team was bonkers, finishing that high up the table despite having a negative goal difference. This came about largely because we took some absolute hidings that season courtesy of a wide open playing style that would produce a 4-2 defeat at Charlton one week and a 3-0 victory at Newcastle the next.

That high finish would gain us entry into the Intertoto Cup and an amazing cup run the following season, that culminated in the legendary 3-1 victory at Metz. Sinclair would play his customary full part, scoring in that game and generally being a key cog in the wheel. His finest moment of our finest season since 1985/86 came during the home game with Spurs.

This should have been the start of something.

***

Unfortunately that something was a decline. We would never again crest those heights as that 5th placed finish became the crowning achievement of Redknapp's time rather than the start of his legend. Paolo di Canio arrived at the end of that 1998/99 season and rather than relying on the team first approach that had served us so well up to that point, Redknapp instead began to focus the team around the mad Italian. This worked fine on the days when he was in the mood, and was a millstone on any day we had to go north of Milton Keynes.

Sinclair continued to be instrumental, however, and was displaying a flair for the spectacular. He scored a number of brilliant goals with us, none better than this effort against Derby which has somehow only survived in this 22 pixel Super 8 video recording made by a drunk Match of the Day cameraman on his day off.

The fact that this goal is so unheralded says a lot about the struggle Sinclair had to get noticed at West Ham. None of his rivals for an England place had the athleticism or technical ability to score this goal, and yet to this day few fans outside of the West Ham faithful will have ever seen it. In the meantime, Sven Goran Eriksson was trying anyone from his milkman to Emile Heskey to fill his troublesome left sided position, with the milkman at least having the benefit of being left footed.

Sinclair by this stage had agreed with new manager Glenn Roeder that he would play there in an attempt to force his way into the 2002 World Cup squad. He managed this at the very last minute when Danny Murphy dropped out of the squad, and incredibly was then called upon as an early substitute during the game with Argentina when Owen Hargeaves was injured. I can still recall the groan in the pub as his number was held up, and my own angry response to that. "Fuck you - you'll see" I thought, and see they did. Sinclair was outstanding in a tremendous England 1-0 win - the last good performance by an England side at a World Cup. His England career lasted 686 minutes and included World Cup games against Argentina and Brazil. Not bad, Trev.

***

It's possible that Sinclair should have left after this, his international aims achieved and with West Ham in turmoil. Redknapp had gone and so too had Ferdinand and Lampard, replaced with average, cheaper players in the true West Ham way.

But I like to think that Sinclair was loyal, and that he loved the club too much to abandon us. He certainly played as though he did and I particularly enjoyed his titanic performance at West Brom in that ill fated relegation season of 2002/03 when he scored twice in a seemingly crucial 2-1 win. In writing this series of articles I realise now that my heroes have always been brave players, who never shirked their responsibilities and never gave up the ghost. Sinclair's last game for us was the apocalyptic 2-2 draw at Birmingham on the last day of that 2002/03 season and Sinclair had to be led off the pitch after the game, as despondent as those in the stands. He would join Manchester City soon after, as Bishop had done. I quite liked that as I always had a strange feeling that they were our spiritual cousins in those pre-Dubai days.

When I look back on his time with us I find much to admire about Sinclair. His qualities as a footballer were always self evident, but his qualities as a man were frequently on display too. I think he was the most unselfish player I've ever seen at West Ham, prepared to play anywhere and to uncomplainingly do the work which others would actively seek to avoid. He never backed away from the challenge and never left anything in the tank. Look back at goals from that era and notice how often Sinclair is there celebrating the efforts of others. He was, in a team of egotists, the ultimate team man.

He played all over the pitch too, primarily as a wing back but also during one otherwise unremarkable home game against Everton in 2002 as a makeshift central midfielder. Other wingers would have moaned - Sinclair scored the winner in a 1-0 win.

But perhaps most importantly of all, he was also a man possessed of great joy. I think one thing that drew me to him was his evident delight at playing the game and playing for West Ham. Here was someone living my dream and doing me the credit of giving that dream every ounce of his energy. No football fan can ask anything more than that from their hero. I love that he still seems to cherish his bond with the club, and like Bishop before him, always realised the great privilege he had and played accordingly.

***

It never occurred to me in writing this article that I would end up mentioning the colour of Trevor Sinclair's skin or talking about race. This is primarily because as a then 19 and now 38 year old white guy, I have never had to face any discrimination in my life. I am so privileged that it never even occurred to me that Sinclair's skin colour was of any importance to anyone. 

And now you know where they got the idea for The Adjustment Bureau

And yet, as a kid growing up in multi-cultural Goodmayes, one thing I did notice was how few of my friends of colour followed West Ham. My black mates all seemed to follow Arsenal and my Asian friends all seemed to support Manchester United or Liverpool. This is an observation so unscientific and useless that it might as well have come from a climate change denier, but it speaks to my own personal experience. Until we moved to the new stadium I hardly ever saw West Ham fans of colour at our games, despite our catchment area being among the least white in the country.

I always assumed that this was because when I was a kid fans of colour were only just feeling able to attend games and choose teams to support and that West Ham weren't particularly good. Similarly, due to me having a season ticket in the same place for years I guessed that I'd just fallen into a routine of seeing the same faces all the time and that there were fans of colour all over the rest of the ground. But perhaps there was something else. 

In researching this article I noticed that while West Ham have a rich tradition of black players, and were the first English club to have three black players in their team (not the more heralded West Brom team of ten years later), not many of those players stuck around that long. Sinclair was the 27th black player to turn out for West Ham per this out of date link from Ex magazine, and of those players only four - John Charles, Clyde Best, George Parris and Rio Ferdinand - would make more than 100 appearances for the club. Compare that the outstanding Arsenal team of the time and their core of black players like Paul Davis, Michael Thomas and David Rocastle.

Young people want to look at their icons and feel a connection. It's why my three girls love the new Star Wars movies with their kick ass female leads more than they love Iron Man. I can't blame my teenage black mates from Ilford who identified more with Ian Wright than they did with Frank McAvennie.

This is not Frank McAvennie

Why is this important? Well, it seems to me that Trevor Sinclair, as well as being amongst West Ham's finest ever players, probably has a claim to being our greatest ever black player. Certainly John Charles and Clyde Best blazed a trail that was both terrifying and socially important, and Parris, Bobby Barnes and Leroy Rosenior played at a time of great significance and against a barrage of racist abuse.

By the late Nineties, racism was nowhere near as prevalent as it was then, but it would be foolish to think it didn't and still doesn't exist. Look at the paucity of black managers, coaches and officials. Remember that the England team were racially abused as recently as 2004 in Spain and that UEFA thought a fine of £45,000 was sufficient as punishment. Google Malky Mackay, Luis Aragones and Ron Atkinson. Ask yourself this - who do you think of when you think of players the media routinely describe as not having a football brain? Off the top of my head it conjures up images of Theo Walcott, Emile Heskey, Marlon Harewood and latterly Michail Antonio. Notice anything similar about them?

At the same time, think of the players who you've heard described as having a high footballing intelligence. Wayne Rooney, Lee Bowyer, Teddy Sheringham and Paul Gascoigne all jump out to me. That's right folks, we're living in a world where an erudite, well educated kid like Theo Walcott doesn't have a brain and yet Rooney and Gazza are bright. 

This is what footballing intelligence looks like

I never even noticed this insidious brand of racism until a friend of mine, a father of two mixed race boys, pointed it out to me. I was, in my own clueless way, complicit in it becoming an accepted part of footballing analysis. White players are smart and savvy. Black players are big, strong, fast and dumb.

So what does all of this have to do with Trevor Sinclair? Well, nothing and everything. 

There are obviously arguments that Rio Ferdinand, Ian Wright and David James could have been better West Ham players than him, but I think all enjoyed their peaks away from Upton Park. Sinclair was here for his best years and was outstanding. He was both athletic and intelligent, technical and pacey, smart and savvy. He put the lie to that bullshit all on his own. 

As iconic figures in the black struggle to break into professional football I wish the club would do more to commemorate Best, Ade Coker and John and Clive Charles, but I'm not sure any of them were Sinclair's equal as a player. 

I'm not a black West Ham supporter so I can't say for certain what his impact was on that community, but it in retrospect it looks to me like that team with him, Ferdinand, Hislop, Wright, Foe and others was the first truly multi-cultural team we had. Sinclair played most frequently, had the longest peak and was the longest serving of that team. I also think he was the best. 

I'm aware that I'm writing about something I doubt I fully understand but that's never stopped me in the past, and indeed I hope people see this for what it is intended to be - a celebration of a great player. I would love to hear from those who have any better informed thoughts on the topic, or indeed who saw any of those older players in their primes. Maybe I'm doing them a huge disservice. 

***

Either way, thank you Trevor, for your dedication, your brilliance, your joy and your love for West Ham. For joining at a pivotal time in our history and pushing us forward. For never stopping running, even when the reality of being 7-1 down at Blackburn hit you squarely between the eyes. For those spectacular goals that caused an entire generation of young Hammers to smash their kitchen windows in attempting to emulate them. And lastly, thank you for taking the legacy of those heroic black West Ham players who came before you and driving that forward too, by representing West Ham at the World Cup, taking us to fifth and a European title (of sorts) and making over 200 appearances and still smiling even when they made you play with Lee Bowyer. 

I'm not sure we ever realised how good we had it with you out there, and you probably never realised quite how important you were. Cheers, Trev.

EDIT: And thanks to the brilliant Rob Banks, we now have the full compilation of Trevor Sinclair's West Ham goals. Enjoy.

Trevor Sinclair - Appearances 203 (3) Goals 38

I'm going to write a few of these sporadically. I have already got a few suggestions for old match reports but if there are any other players to consider, then please let me know on Twitter (@TheHList). Please bear in mind the age range, mind you...

Manchester United 4 - 0 West Ham (And Other Ramblings)

Yesterday I drove for the best part of twelve hours from Essex to Southern France, which is roughly enough time to get me halfway to Manchester based on some reports I read today, and I'm completely knackered. In fact my back hurts more than Joe Hart's currently does after he spent the afternoon examining the back of the Old Trafford goals.

So this is an abbreviated holiday H List, available only because while I was channelling my inner F. Scott Fitzgerald today, I stumbled across a Dutch satellite feed of this game and decided to waste an hour and a half of my family holiday watching it.

Which was a mistake.

This is what happens when you look directly at a downward spiral

You see, to my mind there is a tacit, unspoken agreement between football fans and players that the opening game of any season is different. It just is. Over the course of the next ten months there are going to be days when the team won't play well, fans will lose faith and players will lose form but the one thing we can agree on is that opening day is non negotiable. No matter who you play, the sunshine will be glorious, the tans haven't yet faded and the team will champing at the bit after pre-season training and will give everything in pursuit of victory. 

The positive line of thinking is that new signings will be desperate to impress, existing players will be playing for their places and new contracts and in that golden, sunlit moment the entire world is pregnant with possibility. And yet watching us play this game I was instead reduced to wondering whether Pedro Obiang was actually pregnant, so immobile and off the pace was he. 

The team didn't uphold their end of the bargain today. 

***

I don't really object to us losing to Manchester United. The question with them is never "Why did we lose to them?", but rather "How can it be that we've ever beaten them?". At £24m Marko Arnautovic is our largest ever signing, and yet he would be 23rd in the equivalent list of transfers for the Red Devils. They spent more on Anderson than we've ever spent on a player, and they bought him a decade ago. 

Their financial superiority is such that we always travel to these games more in hope than expectation. It's how the Premier League is drawn up. Teams like West Ham are supposed to turn up, put up a bit of a fight and then have the good grace to concede a late winner right in front of the advertising hoarding hawking such wares as the official Manchester United tractor, as happened today. 

What was so crushing about this performance was therefore not the content but the style. It was as if the team had been set a ninety minute test by the Oxford English Dictionary to redefine the word "insipid". 

This is literally the best combination produced by two West Ham players today

Looking around the Premier League this weekend was to see hungry teams battling for points everywhere. By all reports ours was the worst, most spineless performance of the lot. No ambition, no organisation, no fight and most alarmingly of all - no change from last year. Here are our results against the current best six teams in the division since the start of last season:

Man Utd 4 - 0 West Ham

West Ham 0 - 4 Liverpool

West Ham 1 - 0 Spurs

Arsenal 3 - 0 West Ham

West Ham 1 - 2 Chelsea

West Ham 0 - 4 Man City

West Ham 0 - 2 Man Utd

Liverpool 2 - 2 West Ham 

West Ham 1 - 5 Arsenal

Man Utd 1 - 1 West Ham 

Spurs 3 - 2 West Ham

Man City 3 - 1 West Ham

Chelsea 2 - 1 West Ham

This also ignores a 5-0 home defeat to Man City in the FA Cup and a 4-1 loss at Old Trafford in the EFL Cup. 

It's easy to brush off games such as this, and consign them to memory. They are kind of like the sequels to The Matrix in that respect: I accept they happened and that I paid money to see them but I refuse to acknowledge their existence in my decision making. 

So, Joe, can you describe how it felt making your West Ham debut?

So we continue to make excuses and continue to look forward. These are the default responses for football fans because it's just how we are wired - there is always something on the horizon that is cause for optimism. There is always another game and always someone coming back from injury to make things right, especially at West Ham. Indeed, we are fans so desperate for something to wish on that we all decided Gary Lewin was our signing of the summer back in July. And then everyone was still injured for the first game.

But these are not the results of a good team. They are not the results of a resolute, well drilled, organised team. They are the results of a group of players who face a gaping gulf in class every time they face this opposition, and have no idea how to traverse it. Sure, an away defeat at Manchester United isn't anything to get too concerned about, given they'll beat most teams at home this year, but I think we're allowed to raise an eyebrow at the manner of it all. If Bilic is able to introduce anything before next Saturday, I would hope it would be some semblance of a backbone. I find it exasperating how rarely these days we can even compete in these fixtures, let alone win them.

So, yes, I understand those who will say that this is just one game. But isn't it the same one game we've seen this team play over and over again for a year?

***

At the end of the calamitous 16/17 season Slaven Bilic identified pace as the single biggest feature lacking from his team. Our summer transfer policy not only ignored this, but somehow appears to have made things worse. I've seen tides come back quicker than our midfield today when we were hit on the counter. This is just one of the many problems when the Chairman buys the players for a manager in the last year of his contract, and with little apparent ability to convince the former of his suitability for an extension. The distance between Bilic's desired type of player and his real ones seems quite hefty.

As such, we today fielded quite possibly the slowest West Ham team I can remember seeing in my lifetime, and I was there when we had Andy Melville at centre back. We were without Lanzini and Antonio, which always made it unlikely we would play well, but the pedestrian nature of it all was a shock. Chicharito looked so isolated he may soon have his nickname changed to "Siberia" and Arnautovic did enough to suggest that he will mix moments of magic and moaning with all the adroitness of the departed Payet. 

But we cannot play at this walking pace in the Premier League and survive. With Feghouli and Snodgrass AWOL, Fernandes was pressed into a number ten role and did a passable impression of a square peg. What brief moments of attacking intent we did have seemed to spring from Noble and yet he was surprisingly replaced instead of the possibly expectant Obiang. The centre of the team is a huge hole that the summer signings don't address, and if the rumours linking us to William Carvalho are true then he can't arrive soon enough. 

But where is the joie de vivre of that 15/16 season? Certainly the league was weaker then, but we never played so shapelessly or with such little belief even once that season. Now it is de rigeur for us to get a hiding, blame it on injuries or new stadiums or disruptive Frenchmen or bad horoscopes or the Boogie and just muddle on with no apparent improvement. My upper lip doesn't seem to be stiff enough for this line of thinking.

***

If one wants to look for positives, I thought Zabaleta battled well, especially as he was up against the quicksilver Rashford and being 54 years old means he usually spends Sundays at his allotment. I also thought Joe Hart did alright considering the relentless barrage he faced. He should perhaps have stopped Pogba's effort - down low to that troublesome left side again - but that wasn't the reason we lost today. If he wants an opportunity to show Gareth Southgate he is still England's best shot stopper then the logic of his move becomes clear very quickly. He's going to get plenty of chance to do it with us. 

Declan Rice made a surprising cameo from the bench and looked pretty decent. Perhaps the logic of that perplexing decision to loan out Reece Oxford is simply that they think Rice is better? I have no idea - divining a strategy in any of our moves these days is like watching toddlers play chess. 

Elsewhere, I don't really have very much to cling on to. It perhaps speaks volumes that having watched the game in its entirety I still have no idea what our gameplan was today. We seem tactically bereft, like one of those early 20th century British army units marching with great gusto toward certain defeat, led by a general with no military ideas beyond a belief that everything will be alright in the end.

We're away next week again, of course, courtesy of the gift that keeps on taking - the athletics stadium with a football pitch on it. This makes it difficult to regroup and difficult to roar back. Maybe we'll win 3-1 again at Southampton, and all of this will just be yet more of that negative whinging so many of you criticise me for, but for now the pessimists are winning, I'm afraid. 

It's early of course, and nothing is won or lost on opening day, but I'm waiting on a sign. I want to see something to tell me that this year will be different to last. Something to encourage me that we are going to be more competitive, more organised, more steely when the going gets tough. Even for those who believe these articles to be too negative must concede that performances like today are a disgrace, just as I will concede that there were some mitigating factors. 

Tomorrowland - are we nearly there yet?

My main overarching issue with the current leadership of the club is the failure to develop and adhere to a cogent overarching strategy to develop the team over time. Instead everything is done reactively, expensively and on such a short term basis that it all has to be ripped down and rebuilt again every couple of years. 

I would happily accept performances like today if I felt it was the necessary cost of progression. But it's not. It's just the result of having an old, slow team, a terrible injury record and the opposition being as rich as Croesus. And Lukaku. Always fucking Lukaku.

If we have to think in such a short term way, then it doesn't seem unreasonable to want some returns on a fairly short term basis. Our next three games are Southampton, Newcastle and Huddersfield - each tricky in their own way but there are points to be taken there. And they'd better be taken. This is Sullivan's borrowed time and therefore it's Bilic's too. We can't keep waiting for tomorrow because at some point we have to win today.

So I've had enough with the injuries and the good young players a couple of years away and the settling into the new stadium and all the other stuff that stops the team playing well. When your Director of Football admits he is implementing a strategy that is "not good for the long term" then you lose the right to bring those things up. It's tough shit. 

We're all about the here and now, so I want some fucking results here and now. I want my back four to look like they've met before. I want my left back to actually leave the ground when he jumps. I want my defence well enough organised that we don't have the smallest member marking Lukaku at free kicks and corners. I want my captain to be so influential he can last ninety minutes. I want an attacking strategy that can actually cause trouble to defenders as average as Phil Jones. I want a net spend bigger than Watford. I want a manager who can find ways to make us competitive against better teams and not one who has us conceding four every time we play anyone half decent.

And most of all I want it today. Not tomorrow.