Crystal Palace 2 - 2 West Ham (And Other Ramblings)

"Now I've swung back down again, it's worse than it was before

If I hadn't seen such riches, I could live with being poor"

- James, "Sit Down"

So in a week where we learned exactly how long it takes to rig a league cup quarter final draw (it's two hours) we learned how long we are allowed to be happy. It's two days. Two bloody days of savouring that win at Wembley and then we're back on the rollercoaster once again. Even Pontius Pilate got three days of thinking he'd sorted out his Jesus problem before reality started to bite.

The worst thing is that viewed in isolation, it isn't that terrible or surprising that we can't beat the bottom team in the league. Over the last two years we were the only team around who struggled to beat Sunderland and if it wasn't for nine dropped points against relegated teams, we would have finished level on points with runners up Arsenal in 2015/16.

If, if, if - the clarion call of the desperate and the dreamers, but still. Shit.

This. The whole article basically boils down to this.

One thing that did hit me as I watched this game, is how difficult it really is to get a handle on West Ham. We so rarely play in the same formation, or with the same tactical approach or even with the same level of efficiency, that opinion tends to swing wildly from game to game. And so far, every game has come with a caveat: injuries, sendings off, the desperate need to just get a win so we just take what points we can get and then worry about the performance later. 

Someone - and I apologise to whomever it was because I can't remember who posted it and can't find it again now - appeared in my Twitter feed after this game making the point that we haven't played well yet this season. My immediate thought was that this was ludicrously harsh, but if you take that to mean a complete ninety minute performance then that's probably true. Even the Miracle of Wembley required a disaster in the first half, in order for the whole thing to be miraculous.

So I thought I'd list out our league performances so far and see if it's really true that each game has had a sizeable caveat attached to it, and whether any of them can really be said to be good, front to back, 90 minute displays:

Opposition	Result	Caveat
Man Utd	0-4	They'll beat everyone, loads of injuries
Southampton	2-3	Ten men, played well second half, ref
Newcastle	0-3	Loads of injuries, everything will be better at home
Huddersfield	2-0	All that matters is the result, it's hard at home
West Brom	0-0	Nobody plays well against West Brom
Spurs	2-3	Good start, we played Andy Carroll
Swansea	1-0	All that matters is the result
Burnley	1-1	Ten men, did you see that one move in the 2nd half?
Brighton	0-3	Erm, we didn't play Andy Carroll
Palace	2-2	Our players have no brains. None of them.

OK, so my immediate thought is that the Burnley game was probably our best performance of the season and it involved seventy minutes with ten men, an assist from our goalkeeper and featured another late equaliser. Overall I think we played well, but draws against Burnley do not contented supporters make, especially when they get followed up with 3-0 defeats at home to Brighton. 

Our two victories were both fairly dire, albeit we were the better team on both occasion. We're just so inconsistent from game to game, from half to half and even from one passage of play to another, that any kind of objective assessment feels impossible. But what fans really want is a complete display from start to finish, with all areas of the team functioning and a resounding victory, because that allows us to stop thinking of sustained competence as being a hypothetical concept. 

***

Take this game for instance. How can you moan about a team being two nil up at half time, with two superbly engineered and wonderfully taken goals? Well, I suppose the reality is that at the interval everything did seem to going swimmingly, even if we did have to rely upon an absolutely amazing double save from Joe Hart to keep us in front at 1-0. So what though, that's what he's there for, after all. 

But then the came the worst second half defensive performance since John Parker left Ford's Theatre, Washington DC, 1865 during the intermission of "Our American Cousin" to go and have a drink at a saloon next door. While he was getting smashed, John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln and Parker struggled to get much more work in the bodyguard field, although he did later turn out a couple of times at right back for West Ham. 

That's it Michail, into the corner 

At one point in the first half of this game I was beginning to wonder if it was possible to write an article about a match where nothing happened. Even Sartre would have found this all a bit challenging to describe, as two very poor teams engaged in a battle to see who could do least with most. 

And then the game sprang into life. Wilfried Zaha broke into the box and went down in a tangle with Jose Fonte. I thought it looked a bit innocuous, but would have probably wanted it given at the other end. As it was, Bobby Madley waved it away and we then swept upfield with a glorious move that culminated in Chicharito slotting home his fourth of the season. The goal was fairly reminiscent of Lanzini's winner in the corresponding fixture last year, as Cresswell served it up on a plate and the Mexican cleverly flicked it in with the outside of his boot. 

Prominent in the build up to that goal was Andre Ayew, playing just off the striker and getting on the ball very nicely, and he was at it again a few minutes later. This time he latched on to a loose ball courtesy of some good pressing by Fernandes, and drove forward, turned Scott Dann so many times he could have opened a bottle of Merlot with him, and then smashed it in to the top corner from outside the box. He probably should have slipped in Fernandes outside him, but when you're having the kind of week he is, you can't blame him for taking it on. 

As it is, all West Ham players should probably be shooting from everywhere at Selhurst Park as we only ever seem to score screamers against them. 

So a two nil lead at half time seemed fairly sustainable against a team who had scored twice all season, but as this shot map from Caley Graphics shows, you can make an argument that we were fortunate to get anything at all such was the dominance of the home team. But football games aren't played on spreadsheets and when you get to the 97th minute of a game with the lead then you expect to leave with three points. This one was a gut wrencher. 

***

When whoever it is that assembles the playing staff at West Ham decided to put together the oldest, slowest backline in the league I'm fairly sure that they weren't envisioning games like today. We are now ten games into the season and have the third worst goal difference in the league, Zabaleta has been booked five times, we have been beaten 3-0 by two promoted teams and have conceded four penalties. 

Today it was Angelo Ogbonna who decided to forget everything he had learned playing for Juventus and Italy, and brainlessly nudged over Andros Townsend right at the start of the second half. It was soft as ice cream in a sauna and wouldn't have been a penalty in 1985, but as far as arguments go that's not actually a very good one. The penalty went in and suddenly we lost any momentum rolling over from Spurs and instead found ourselves penned back as the home team bombed forward. 

Moments after that goal, Yohan Cabaye hit the post and we were wobbling mightily. It was good timing then, for Joe Hart to start illustrating quite why we'd gone out and paid so much money to get him when Adrian is a perfectly capable Premier League keeper. Wave after wave of home attacks were repelled with a combination of last ditch blocks and brilliant Hart saves. 

Among a number of fine stops, he kept out a Cabaye free kick that looked destined for the top corner and somehow tipped a James Tomkins header on to the bar. In truth, much of the Palace threat came from set pieces as they looked for all the world like West Ham 2014/15 under Sam Allardyce, featuring long deep crosses to Tomkins that were then kept alive in the box for onrushing attackers.  It took a decent amount of World War One style Tommies in the trenches defending to keep them out, which was fitting as we were wearing our new third kit which is apparently a homage to our first ever strip in 1900. 

Joe Hart, ladies and gentleman

So Hart probably deserved better than to be beaten by Zaha's 97th minute equaliser, but in reality we couldn't complain. Had we not wasted so much time throughout the second half we wouldn't have been on the pitch to have given up the goal. As it was, Lanzini and Antonio took a free kick in the 87th minute and decided to keep it in the corner. This was particularly ironic as Palace would score their second a whole ten minutes later, but perhaps more crucially still - neither one of them took it in the fucking corner. 

***

Ah yes, taking the ball into the corner to protect a one goal lead. It's boring and negative when it's done against you, and the height of professional game management when your team does it. And now this morning, Antonio has been roundly criticised for failing to do exactly that in the minute before the goal. 

The problem I have with this is that had Antonio ignored the three on one situation in the Palace box, where Ayew, Lanzini and Chicharito were waiting for any kind of decent cross, and gone over to the corner flag it's still possible that the same thing could have happened. He could still easily have lost the ball, and Palace could have broken away and scored and everybody would have lost their shit that he was being so negative and spurned a gold plated opportunity to seal the win.

Therefore, my issue with Antonio doing what he did isn't that he did it, but more that he did it so badly. The worst part of it all is that any half decent ball would surely have resulted in a goal, which is of course the absolute best way to kill off a game. As it was, Dann chested the laziest pass of all time back to Speroni, and Palace worked it out to Zaha who did a bizarre loop with the ball before driving the winner through a crowd of legs and thousands of West Ham fans muttered "Of course he fucking did" to whomever they were with at the time, before crying like we were watching a walrus trying to find a bit of ice left at the North Pole to park her kid on.

That said, we had so many opportunities to launch late breakaway counters and we seemed clueless as to how to do it. I haven't seen a group of people so unsure of how to attack since the villagers in The Magnificent Seven. 

As such, I have no issue with Antonio doing what he did - he should have just done it better. And maybe the players in the box could have actually chased back, but then I guess when we all moan that the team doesn't look remotely fit enough, we can't really complain when they can't physically match other teams in the late stages of games.

And so the rollercoaster surges on. 

***

What is interesting after games like this is how we all fall very easily into the trap of telling each other how obvious and predictable it was that this would happen. Truthfully that's not really very fair as we are no worse than any other team when it comes to defending two goal leads. However, as a club we are pretty bad for letting in late goals, and we also have exceptional timing, meaning that we would of course throw away a two goal lead just two days after skewering Spurs in the same way. It's more West Ham than Bubbles, Bobby Moore and getting drawn away in the cups to Big Clubs (™). 

Under Bilic our record in this situation is actually pretty good:

2-0 Up			2-0 Down
W	L	D	W	L	D
11	1	1	1	21	3

So, with a two nil lead this is only the second time that we've failed to win under Bilic. The other was when we were ahead against Watford at the London Stadium and then Troy Deeney got upset about rabonas and everybody forgot how to defend and instead just rode around on unicycles squirting water in each others faces.

It would perhaps be better if you tried to ignore how often we have gone 2-0 down under Bilic unless you want to completely lose your mind.

***

And what of Bilic? What does this game tell us about him? We routinely lead the league in defensive errors that lead to goals and that shows no sign of abating. You can argue that he isn't responsible for experienced defenders giving away needless penalties or you can say that when people keep continually making mistakes in his teams that perhaps the structure in which they are playing isn't conducive to error free football.

As it is, we don't really know anything today that we didn't already know yesterday. He still seems cursed with bad luck, he still can't organise a defence, and juggling all his attacking options around seems to befuddle him. Here he pushed Kouyate back into a trio of centre backs and he did pretty well, perhaps unsurprisingly given that the 3-4-3 came back into fashion when Barcelona started dropping their central midfielders between their centre backs and sending their full backs off like auxiliary wingers. The problem is that without him in midfield we lacked the ability to carry the ball or break up play, and even Manuel Lanzini looked peripheral as we struggled to get him in possession.

We also scored with our only two shots on target which either shows a pleasing level of efficiency or a desperate lack of creativity, depending on your world view. While all of that was happening Obiang, Antonio, Carroll and Arnautovic were on the bench and you couldn't help but return to that question one more time - what the hell were we trying to achieve with our summer transfer activity?

So Bilic will wander onwards, because when he was given two games to save his job it didn't make any particular sense, but once you say that then you probably can't fire him after a win and a draw even when the circumstances of those results were so crazy.

It will surprise none of you to know that I don't think a great deal of our Board and their management structure, but I have some sympathy over this decision. How can you assess this? It's impossible to sift through all the madness of those two matches and draw anything concrete from it. And realistically, this constantly undulating graph of our performance that reflects a Himalayan skyline is probably reflective of where we are as a club. Everything is chaotic, there's loads of wild stuff happening behind the scenes and in the end that was always going to bleed out on to the pitch.

Changing the manager might help, purely because they might be able to organise our defence to at least recognise each other occasionally, but I don't think it would make too much difference. This is the problem when you choose not to back a manager by giving him a new contract, but also choose not to fire him. So Bilic exists in this strange footballing purgatory because we all accept that you can't get anyone better in November, especially when you're down with the dead men, but we all know he won't be staying beyond July. In some respects it's probably a testimony to his man management skills that the players pay any attention to him at all given the circumstances, but even though that may be true, I really do wish he'd sort out our back four.

So on we roll, back on the rollercoaster.

***

In a week where the growth of English youth football is on everyone's mind, it's worth noting that England have won both the u17 and u20 World Cups without any West Ham players. This has been a common theme this summer, as most of the best kids seem to come from the same academies - Manchester City, Chelsea and Arsenal are prominent - and it does lead me to wonder quite what is happening with our scouting.

It's not to say we don't have kids at these tournaments as Dan Kemp and Nathan Trott were squad players at their respective Toulon and European Finals, while Domingos Quina also represented Portugal in the latter. But what is striking is how so many of the kids that represent England at these tournaments come from London and how we really seem to be struggling to identify and attract those kids.

Quina was picked up from Chelsea and the likes of Toni Martinez and Martin Samuelson were also transferred for decent sums. Not that this isn't a reasonable way to acquire players but what I'm referring to is the older method of picking up a boy at the age of 9 or 10 and bringing him through your system, moulded as the kind of player you want. We've been struggling with this for a while, and maybe Declan Rice and Reece Oxford will prove us wrong but it's starting to concern me that London kids might now be presented with three other better options for their footballing development at Chelsea, Spurs and Arsenal.

A friend of mine took his very talented nine year old to West Ham recently at the club's request, and when they arrived he was bunched in with a huge number of other children and nobody took any notice of them. His main observation after watching his son learn precisely nothing in an hours worth of coaching, was that "they fail primarily as human beings".

One persons experience isn't indicative of anything, but at some point we may want to ask why our youth policy isn't delivering players in the same way as other teams. Declan Rice might very well be one such player but our London rivals are currently producing Premier Leaguers at a rate of far higher than once every five years, as we tend to do.

I don't know enough to comment fully on this, but I highlight it just to make the point. More help from the Academy is needed. 

Spurs 2 - 3 West Ham (And Other Ramblings)

Sometimes it's easy to take things for granted. Sometimes it's easy to forget what made us fall in love with people, or places, or things or even, yes, football teams. 

Since I started writing The H List again at the start of last season, I think I've forgotten a little of what it is that brings me to games, and that drives the love I have for my team. What it is exactly that has me excitedly texting my Dad before matches to see if he's listening, or rushing home from work so I can tune in to some far off evening game in the North. 

There's plenty of things wrong with West Ham, but Christ when she dances she can really move. 

Pretty, pretty, pretty good

So this isn't a night to talk about boardroom structures, managerial changes, xG or the training pitches at Rush Green. Tonight is a night to truly kick back and revel in the simple joy of being a football fan.  These are the nights we live for. Sure, Spurs fans are going to have spent all evening sending you sarcastic text messages, before deciding that this was suddenly a game they didn't care about. Forget them, our joy needn't be defined by anybody else. These are the games that make it all worthwhile. 

Forget the jibes about it being our Cup Final too. Who gives a shit? If it was, well, we just went two nil down and came back to win it three - two. At Wembley. And you're trying to somehow use this to mock us? Fuck off and go and relearn what it is to be a football fan, brother. 

Because on nights like this, when it all comes together and elevates us above our circumstances and grown men hug perfect strangers and people can't stop smiling and goalkeepers run seventy yards to celebrate a goal - that - that, is what being a football fan is all about. Certainly we have to put up with a lot of abject misery to get to this point, but that's just the base that flavours the cake. 

It's that same feeling of lightning in the veins that has me sat here at 1.30am with The Stone Roses for company, pouring all of this out on to the page. For it's easy enough to take pot shots at the board week after week, but it's a rare treat to write about a match like this when young kids, old hands and unlikely heroes stepped out of the shadows and firmly on to the stage when we needed them most. 

But this feeling....man, I love my children dearly and the best thing I can do for them is to let them know they are loved, keep them safe and help them grow up as decent people. But I wish I could bottle this feeling for them too and leave it under the Christmas tree. Maybe I'm in a post match adrenaline fuelled frenzy, but right now there is an awful lot to savour in this moment. 

***

The crazy thing about this game is that the first half was awful. After forty five minutes we were two nil down, and I had literally no idea what we were doing to attempt to score a goal. Andy Carroll was once more marooned up front like a pissed Geordie lighthouse and the formation behind him was so confusing that after twenty minutes I was reduced to assuming it was some sort of homage to Brownian Motion. 

Mauricio Pochettino went full Spurs before the game by telling everyone that he was only interested in winning important trophies and that this wasn't one of them, before naming a team that had seven changes from Sunday but still had a very "Jesus, Poch, I thought you weren't taking this seriously" vibe to it. 

By contrast, Bilic made nine changes and put out a group with a very "I got drunk and picked this out of a hat" feel. Two central midfielders, Rice and Kouyate, were in a back three while Andre Ayew came in to play in that weird netherworld between here and Narnia, which still didn't put him close enough to Carroll to have any impact on anything. 

Meanwhile, Wembley was strangely flat as the home fans kept their powder dry for Real Madrid next week, and the atmosphere got lost in the wide open spaces. In fairness, we should have felt right at home. 

Moussa Sissoko opens the scoring

Yet things began in customary style as Spurs scored after just six minutes, while our guys were apparently still doing an introductory ice breaker session in the centre circle. I'm not saying Moussa Sissoko was in a lot of space when he broke on to a Son through ball, but he could have been in a scene from the fucking English Patient so isolated was he. 

With that goal went the light canopy of hope that covered the West Ham end and attentions soon turned to the World Posturing Championships being held between home and visiting fans at the periphery of the away section. It's half term so both teams were strongly represented. 

Meanwhile, on the pitch, after long periods of not very much, Dele Alli doubled the lead with a deflected effort, coming shortly after he had been brilliantly denied once already by Adrian. With that, all optimism went south and chants of "Sack The Board" could be heard in full throated roar. When the away following turns, it won't be long before others follow. It felt like the start of a long night, especially as Spurs seemed to be barely out of first gear.

While this isn't a time for long detailed analysis, there was much to lament about that first half. Carroll has been roundly criticised this season, but it's hard to find fault with him when he's being played in a system so manifestly unsuited to his strengths. That said, his effort in the first half wasn't sufficient and with no pressure on the ball anywhere Spurs were dominating us as though we were a lower league team having a jolly day out in the Big Smoke. 

To watch Spurs attack is to really see the difference between us and the business end of the league. Here they zipped and spun and glided and built their attacks like they were wearing ice skates on a frozen pond. By contrast, we seemed to be attempting to push a trebuchet up a hill, and so poor were we that our only effort of any note was a long range Noble strike that Michel Vorm could have kept out with a fairly solid exhale. 

At half time some people left and I can't say I would ever do the same, but I also didn't have any more optimism than them. After a performance that seemed to scream "and you thought Brighton was bad", the only question was how much we could limit the damage. 

***

When I was a kid I spent hours playing in my back garden, and my absolute favourite scenario was Spurs in the Cup Final at Wembley. We'd go two down and then I would lead a stirring fightback to claim the trophy with a stunning 3-2 win. I was a centre back at the time, so it did require quite a lot of imagination, some patient parents and also many daffodils died to bring you that little reminiscence. 

So on a night of childhood fantasy, it seems fitting to me that the guy who probably had the exact same dreams as me was there to lead our fightback. Mark Noble gets plenty of criticism from people like me, but this was a beautiful two fingers to us all as he combined with the electric Lanzini to start, finally, pushing Spurs back. 

I mean, you wouldn't want to have to explain this to your wife

Some seem to think it was the Noble fisticuffs with Danny Rose that got things moving, or maybe that the lads were injected with "passion" at half time but I'm not sure I'd ascribe it to any of those things. Fernandes and Ayew went further forward and got closer to Carroll, Noble began to win the ball in midfield and Lanzini just started to run riot. As we began to win some loose balls, and finally get on top of Son, their best player, we edged into the contest. 

Carroll too, began to work, with all the lugubrious effort of a shire horse in the rain and then in fifteen glorious minutes we were back in it. First, a Lanzini corner fell to Fernandes on the edge of the box and his low drive was only parried by Vorm to the waiting Ayew, who poked it home. The Ghanian does a very passable impression of Chicharito, it has to be said. 

Five minutes later he was at it again, as this time Carroll produced a lovely deft header to free Lanzini, who in turn gloriously pulled it down with his left and crossed with his right for Ayew to finish sumptuously. At this point, there was a palpable sense of disbelief around the national stadium. Spurs fans were perplexed at how their brilliantly coached, fluidly moving team were capitulating in the face of the first flush of competition they'd faced all evening and West Ham fans were wondering where the hell this had been all season and whether their half time pints had been laced with LSD. Better was to come as Ogbonna rose unchallenged to nod home a Lanzini corner, and in the space of fifteen minutes Slaven Bilic had written another one of his famous survival stories into the annals of his West Ham history.

And, in truth, that was that. As dangerous as they looked before the break, Spurs were completely toothless afterward. In the cold light of reflection they never threatened, and as our Ayew led frontline continued to stretch them and harry them and dog them, it was tempting to wonder quite how much lasagne the home team had eaten at half time. 

***

And what of Slaven Bilic? Well, if he has to take the criticism for losing 3-0 at home to Brighton, then he surely gets to stand on his desk and give people like me the bird after this. There are whispers that there was a team meeting in the week, but when you start giving credence to stuff like that you're on the slippery slope to believing in things like fairies and the existence of decent Vin Diesel films. Bilic is the manager and we don't get to attribute the wins to the players and the defeats to him. That's not how this works. It's not a US Presidential election - there are rules. 

For Bilic, I hope this is the start of him saving his job. That might seem odd, given that I think he should have been sacked ages ago, but if he puts together a long run of fantastic results and drags us up to a top eight finish then that would be a very pleasant way to be wrong. I don't want Bilic to fail - I just think he has, and will continue to do so. But here, when the spotlight was at it's brightest he did what managers are supposed to do. His team were awful in the first half, and he galvanised them to come back and beat a better opponent simply through the force of his own will. Had Pochettino done it, we'd be hearing about it forever. 

I repeat, that's what managers are supposed to do. 

 

It's happened again

Likewise, Andre Ayew deserves his moment of sticking it to the man. While he may be yet another confused signing with no discernible position or obvious use, there can be no denying that on this night he was a leader. His work rate and mobility, particularly in the second half, was the beacon that lit the way for others to follow. And when we needed him, his preternatural positioning allowed him to poach two goals that one assumed couldn't be scored without Chicharito on the pitch. We can't get too carried away, but he is now our top scorer and surely deserves a place on Saturday at Palace, but crucially in whatever position it is that best serves him. I maintain that as best as I can determine, that is as a second striker. All the best with that, Slav. 

Behind him, others stood tall when we needed them. Adrian continues to make a mockery of the notion that he is somehow inferior to Joe Hart, while Byram and Rice showed that there is at last some genuine competition in the squad for places. But perhaps the best thing about tonight was less the individual performances and more the collective pulling together when it was most needed. Teams like us must be more than the sum of our constituent parts or else we will fall in the face of the greater firepower of teams like Spurs. 

Take tonight, when Son was the best player on the pitch in the first half and yet isn't a regular starter for them. The gulf is huge, and while I tend to place my faith in analysis and proper metrics, I also accept that sometimes a team like ours can benefit from more prosaic qualities. Bilic took some abuse this morning for his confusing comments about the team not running enough, as though that was something outside of his control and also as though running around a lot is the sole reason for a team to be doing well. 

But here tonight was a reminder that greater graft and the great drug confidence can be enough to pull a team back into a game. We should perhaps all remember that when times get tough again, and the choice is to either support our players or abuse them. Men like Arnautovic and Carroll could assuredly use a little more, y'know, support from their supporters. 

***

So where to from here? I would suggest nowhere. Enjoy this moment and forget about the Palace game, or the continued slow starts, or the constant tinkering with the formation and instead take a moment to take in what happened tonight. I know it's only a Carabao Cup round of sixteen game, but never let people tell you what you're allowed to be happy about. No, take a minute to savour the idea of brining on Marko Arnautovic when you're trying to defend a lead. Smile at the memory of Andy Carroll and Andre Ayew combining to snuff out last minute attacks in our box with the demented fervour of banshees. Laugh yourself silly at the shenanigans on Wembley Way because, let's face it, we're probably not going to be having that experience again any time soon. 

Live in the moment, folks. We haven't had many of them lately, and whether you've been dreaming about this since you were a little boy or girl, or you came to this Club later through some unfathomably bad decision making on your part, it doesn't matter. Who cares if you're in England or overseas. It matters not if you were there or at home. All that matters is that you are West Ham and tonight our team gave us a gold plated reminder of why we follow. 

3-2 in our cup final? Sure. Why the fuck not. 

After all, that's pretty, pretty, pretty good. 

West Ham 0 - 3 Brighton (And Other Ramblings)

West Ham play Crystal Palace next week and I’m concerned that it will be a meeting of such colossal awfulness that it will somehow destroy the world. I'm not telling you to say goodbye to your loved ones, but I'm not telling you not to either. 

***

On nights like this, when the fans flowed out of the ground like steady rainfall off a roof and the brief, fragile illusion of hope from last week was shattered like a Manchester United coach window, it was hard not to be transported back a few years.

I remember the Bond Scheme era of the early Nineties, when visits to Upton Park were shrouded in a deep sense of unhappiness and I recognise some of that again now. Fans always have a healthy distrust of those who sit in board rooms, but the disconnect now is substantial. In fairness, when you talk haughtily about taking the club to another level, fans are generally going to expect that to be a level up from the one you started at, after all.

Hello crisis, my old friend

I write a lot about the joy of being a football fan, and I think some of that has roots in those early years of being a kid on the North Bank when men were on the pitch holding banners calling the Board “Lying, Thieving Cheats”. That constant cycle of negativity, where one half decent performance would be followed by three awful ones, was a bleak one in which to learn to be a fan. If you wonder quite why Harry Redknapp is still revered in some quarters, it’s worth remembering that he is seen as having delivered us from that. He gave us joy after a long period of genuine misery.

And what price some joy now? Already that magical 2015/16 season seems like something from another lifetime. Thinking back on that now seems like reminiscing about the Renaissance so long ago does it seem, but as commenter Stu from Saturday points out, it only happened last year.

As impossible as it seems right now, all of that joy happened in the last calendar year. Knocking Liverpool out of the Cup? Last year. Stopping Spurs from going top of the league? Last year. 2-0 down at Everton and winning 3-2? Last year. Payet into the top corner at Old Trafford from thirty yards? Last year. Winston Reid with the last goal at Upton Park? Last year.  I realise that I am literally explaining the concept of linear time to you but, my God, what the actual Whitney Houston has happened to us?

And so before we get into the post-mortem, it’s worth remembering that the anger and pain of right now is the direct descendent of the joy of those games and that season. That’s what football is all about.

***

There is always an episode of The Apprentice every year, where the candidates are set the challenge of sourcing a list of slightly obscure items without using the internet, because seemingly when you partner with Alan Sugar you also have to use all his Amstrad gear and apparently they haven’t added WiFi just yet.

Every year when this task arrives, one team spend ages trying to find all the stuff by ringing around and asking, and then run out of time, but get most of it. The other team always engage in no planning whatsoever, instead declaring that they’ll figure it all out “when they get there” and then end up running around at the deadline asking if French people love their children and trying to buy a Top Hat from a dry cleaners.

And then we can buy Chicharito and I'm sure we'll know just how to get the best out of him

We are the latter, of course.

All those failures of our leadership to self-review or acknowledge any of the external criticism of their incompetence has led us to this point, where we are nine games in and already the manager is a lame duck and the season is, at best, one of treading water and at worst a relegation struggle. In October.

And now, as we limp ever onwards with that lack of a plan, strategy or direction it’s even more galling that one of those very same board members sits in judgement on those poor bastards on The Apprentice, who can at least point to the fact that the things they are being asked to do are completely unreasonable.

I have come to the conclusion that West Ham as a club are rather like one of those lorries you see on the M25, where the vehicle has been limited so that it can’t go faster than 60mph. In this analogy I’m not disputing that Bilic needs to be questioned about why he can’t get the lorry past 40mph, but the broader question is why can’t any manager get us past sixty? And the answer lies in those self-imposed limitations.

I really, genuinely think the best manager in the world would struggle at West Ham. The board interfere constantly and unhelpfully, the off the field structure that delivers the playing staff to the first team is a joke and the Academy system doesn’t produce players able to take the team forward.This is a bad recipe for success I say, submitting my entry for the Understatement of the Year 2017 Competition.

It’s probably worth remembering that even in that magical 2015/16 season referenced above, the best campaign many of us have seen for thirty years, we still ended up just seventh, didn’t even qualify for the Europa League proper and Leicester won the whole bloody thing. If ever there was an opportunity for that lorry to go at 70mph it was then, and we still somehow managed to get a flat tyre in sight of the finish line.

***

So while this should be the end for Bilic, there is a pretty decent argument to be made that this is no different to much of what has gone before. Was the team demonstrably worse here than when they lost 3-0 to Southampton, 5-0 to Man City, 5-1 to Arsenal, 4-0 to Liverpool or 3-0 to Newcastle? I understand the difference between losing like this at home to a promoted team and to a Top Six behemoth, but the actual performances have been this abject for ages. So while it’s easy to ask “If not now, when?”, that’s a question we have asked a dozen times before now, and received the same inertia from the Board each time.

In fact, we’ve now reached a point where it’s actually possible to chart the cycle of performances under Bilic:

We’ve been bad under Bilic for a lot longer now than we were good. That’s not a defence of course, he should have gone ages ago, but just an attempt to explain why the Board will more than likely just shrug their shoulders and let it roll on another week. They never planned to extend him past the summer anyway, so a few more of these insipid home performances won't touch the sides. 

I think David Sullivan was off the week they did “sunk costs” on his Economics course.

***

The strange thing about this game is that all the signs were there prior to the match that things were about to perk up. Most agreed that the team had been poorer for having to try and adapt itself to fitting Andy Carroll into the alleged short passing framework that Bilic likes, and were excited by the prospect of seeing Chicharito up front.

Also in was Arthur Masuaku ahead of Aaron Cresswell, who I felt was unlucky to lose his place. It did, however, seem to please the crowd slowly rolling into the arena that Phil Whelans now lovingly refers to as “The Thunderdome”.

And then, nothing.

We saw a passive start, as on so many other evenings just like this, and the visitors took an early lead as Glenn Murray latched on to a Pascal Gross free kick to nod past Joe Hart with less pressure on him than if he was in a vacuum. Gross was the leading chance creator in the Bundesliga last season, by the way, and cost the Seagulls just £4m. It’s amazing what you can find when you take FIFA off domestic mode.

After that we seemingly woke up and pressed Brighton back. It was immediately clear the visitors were very well organised with a clear plan to flood the central areas and force us wide. We complied willingly as Arnautovic and Antonio saw plenty of the ball but wasted it in the fashion of Chevy Chase with the water bottle in the Three Amigos!

Fer cryin' out loud, Marko. Can you beat the first man at least once?

According to Geo from HammersChat, by the end of the game we had thrown in 41 crosses, compared to 26 against Swansea and Spurs and 33 against West Brom and Huddersfield. I feel I must point out at this juncture once again that Andy Carroll was not playing.

What’s especially galling about this is that (as I repeat for the millionth time) crosses are not a great way to score goals at this level. Witness the unstoppable Manchester City machine and their parade of cut backs for onrushing players to score.

If Bilic has set his team up to hammer teams with crosses then he is even less tactically capable than we thought, and if he didn’t and the players just did it anyway then there’s not much point in having a manager who can’t get the team to play how he wants. I mean, if that’s the criteria then I might as well put myself into the mix for the job. I’m cheap and I don’t know how to organise a defence either.

As fans, however, it is hard to distinguish between the institutional incompetence of the structure the players are deployed in, and the personal deficiencies of those players. We currently are 20th in the league for distance covered and high intensity sprints ran. Taken in isolation, you might say those numbers could be explained away for one game like Friday where we dominated possession, but over a season it is a stark indicator of our failings. So as fans, do we lay the blame at the feet of the players who don't make the runs, or the manager who lamented a lack of intensity in training as though it was a natural phenomenon outside of his control? Christ, what a choice. 

Similarly, how much of Friday night was down to Arnautovic and Hernandez being woeful and how much was it down to them being deployed in a system that didn’t suit them? I offer up no answers here because I don’t see how I could know, but the wider point is that whether it’s a failure of tactics or communication, both are vital for managers to succeed and a failure on either front really should be terminal. It is particularly unforgivable that Bilic spent all his summer budget on those two players and very obviously doesn't have a pattern of play in mind to extract the best from them. 

I accept that certain things are out of his hands, and players must take a certain amount of responsibility for their own poor form and lack of independent thinking, but to watch this team on Friday night was like watching a scratch team chucked together for a charity match. I can forgive managers who can't put together a way of playing to get the best out of a front pairing of Usain Bolt and Boris Johnson, but this, however, was a nonsense. 

***

As it is, we know that Sullivan and Gold want to be regarded as owners who give their managers time. Part of this is apparently down to the resistance they met from others within the game when they first took over at Birmingham. I get that – who wants to take lessons on morality and pornography from people who made their fortunes out of dubious housing and banking practices, after all – but they would be wise to consider that continued inaction from a board is just as likely to be problematic as knee jerk reaction.

By not acting once again, they have allowed Everton and Leicester to jump ahead of us. With Ronald Koeman and Craig Shakespeare gone we will now see another two targets go off the board and have two less names to pursue. Even though Everton fans bring their kids with them to on pitch fights, it’s still a more attractive job than ours, not least because the interference from above is less pronounced and the purse strings looser. Leicester, meanwhile, might be about par with us given their crazy board but they have the kudos of a Premier League title to throw around and crucially they've acted first.

When I analyse the way that this West Ham board approach managerial decisions I am forced to conclude that they have little confidence in their own ability to appoint anyone better than they already have in place. If I’m right about that, it is the nearest they have come to self-awareness, albeit given the way they have repeatedly been turned down by their first choice targets it would be odd if they didn’t realise this was true. I still remember David Gold being asked about why they had appointed Avram Grant and him offering up the excuse that “You don’t have anything to go on apart from the interview, do you?”. Christ on a mobility scooter, David, give me a ring – I know how to use Google.

Exactly how good were they to work for, Avram?

So while we may all clamour for Bilic to be dismissed, we have to accept that his replacement is highly unlikely to be much better. There is literally no way this Board could hire the equivalent of Pochettino from Espanyol or Marco Silva from Olympiakos because they don’t have the confidence or decision making structure to identify what it is that makes those individuals better coaches than the likes of Grant or Bilic.

They also don't seem to understand that the wider structure within which a manager operates is as big a factor in his success as his own abilities. For that reason, firing Bilic and replacing him with a mediocre short term hire feels pretty unappealing to me. 

I feel forced to repeat once more that if the people who make decisions on our board about footballing matters were to apply for those same roles at other Premier League clubs, they wouldn’t get them. This should be a sobering thought for all those who think firing Bilic will provide an immediate panacea.

***

Still, at 1-0 down we shouldn’t really have been out of the game, even though the sight of us smashing cross after cross at Chicharito was beginning to feel like watching one of those “Vietnam War” documentary episodes where American troops continued disappearing off into the bush on hopelessly ill thought out missions with little or no success. We are, after all, yet to win a home league game at the London Stadium when the opposition have scored a goal. Going a goal behind has thus been a death knell for the last eighteen months. 

Therefore, Brighton sat back and absorbed lots of first half pressure after taking the lead, although it was noticeable that they broke on the counter with more pace and purpose than we did at any stage. That lack of speed in our team was brutally exposed once more as Antonio was injured in a first half clash and then limped his way through the next seventy minutes. All hail Gary Lewin, folks.

The second goal, on the stroke of half time, killed the game as Joe Hart came rushing off his line to save brilliantly from Murray, but was unfortunate as the ball was recycled back to Izquierdo on the edge of the box. Hart might have expected some of his teammates to have shown an interest at this point, but they were all distracted by the sight of Ian Bishop wearing a particularly fetching hat in the Directors Lounge and instead allowed him to curl a sumptuous shot towards the top left hand corner. From the side I thought Hart had make a second outstanding save but instead he merely palmed it into the top corner and once more we'll have to contemplate whether he really does have more trouble going to his left than Tommy Robinson.

I'm blaming Bish's hat

I thought the acquisition of Hart was a pointless vanity signing for Sullivan, but one thing I would say is that he is probably the best I’ve ever seen coming off his line. He has made a number of outstanding stops in those one on one situations, but at least twice he’s been beaten by rebounds from those saves – here and the second Harry Kane goal against Spurs. If nothing else, that might point to the glacial speed at which our defence transitions back in such situations.

At two down, we might have expected a bit of second half fire and brimstone but instead we got a couple of Lanzini free kicks and yet more crosses towards a worryingly isolated Chicharito. Initially Lanzini had played as the number ten but he soon swapped with Kouyate, who was himself then withdrawn in favour of Ayew at half time. "If in doubt change everything", seemed to be the motto.

With time slipping away, Zabaleta conceded another brainless penalty and Glenn Murray dusted himself down to score his second and hand the visitors a thoroughly deserved win. The worst thing for Brighton was that they couldn't really tell if this was a good performance or not because we were so earth shatteringly, heart breakingly, Robbie Williamsly bad. 

I should probably point out that this was all particularly embarrassing as Glenn Murray is fifty four years old.

***

Back when the Bond Scheme was halving the size of our support, and long before the internet and Twitter, the opinions of fans were shaped and carried by the fanzines of the time. Over Land and Sea, On The Terraces, On A Mission and Fortunes Always Hiding were the message boards of the day and I read them all voraciously. They were my window into the world of what other fans thought, and my hazy recollection is that they led the rebellion against the boardroom incompetence of the time. (I may be getting my timeframes mixed up there as On A Mission was more a Whistle era organ if I recall properly, but I think the point still stands). With such a small number of voices to listen to, I think fans were rallied more easily, and though discontent brewed in the pubs and in the stands rather than in cyberspace, there was a common train of thought among fans, arguably shaped by the fact that fewer people had platforms upon which to express themselves.

Plus ca change

Nowadays, of course, everybody has such an opportunity and the breadth of opinion is wider than a pair of specially made Neil Ruddock shorts. To my mind, with that proliferation has come a general decrease in the quality of thought given to the writing, but also a more disparate set of views. As such, I don't sense the same level of unity among fans as there was back then. Plenty of supporters think the club died when we left Upton Park, while as big a group seem perfectly happy with the new ground and instead lament the failures on the pitch more than anything. Whatever side of the divide you find yourself on, I don't get the sense of an impeding catastrophic seismic event in the stands.

Instead, if I took anything away from Friday it was that the great danger the Club faces now is apathy. I thought it was stark that the ground emptied in the way it did, and telling that people were laughing more at the ineptitude on display than any outright anger. 

Maybe I'm projecting my own world view onto others and I'm a million miles off, but right now I get the impression that a lot of people are despondent about things because they see the bigger picture and wonder about how the club can really move forward, and lament what has been lost in the fruitless pursuit of even the slightest improvement in our on pitch fortunes. 

Bilic will go at some point soon, but whoever comes in will still have to operate in the same broken system, with the same interference and the same financial limitations. I'm not saying people have stopped caring, but maybe they are starting to think that whether they do or not is a bit irrelevant because the board seem so relentlessly incapable of making good decisions. I'm sure you'll tell me if I'm wrong, but it feels to me like the whole club is at a crossroads right now and for every week they allow us to drift along aimlessly like we currently are, they lose a little more of the soul of the club. 

I don't want these clowns making decisions, but even I am forced to accept that it probably would be better if they did something. Because somehow, this cycle needs to be broken. 

Burnley 1 - 1 West Ham (And Other Ramblings)

Two steps forward, two steps back. And so the dance continues.

West Ham with ten men? Yes, no, very strong

In the lead up to the 2012 Olympic Games, the BBC launched an under the radar mockumentary called "Twenty Twelve", which very neatly satirised the delivery team for the Games and successfully captured every type of office stereotype imaginable in doing so.

Once the games were over, the idea probably should have died but instead they moved the subject on to the BBC with a different-but-similar series called "W1A". Against my expectations I found it pretty funny as the series continued to nail all the office politics, incompetence and misplaced entitlement that pervade most large professional organisations. And I say that as an avowed lover of the BBC.

As such, when series 3 arrived I stuck it on looking for some mild amusement and instead...I have never been more frustrated watching a TV show in my life.

Instead of having the characters do or say anything interesting or believable, they just repeat catchphrases at each other for the entirety of the show, while a couple of them are now so stupid that I'm beginning to wonder if the writers are actually attempting to mock people with mental health issues.

And what, I can sense you wondering, could this possibly have to do with West Ham? Well, as with W1A, I am getting very fucking frustrated with this season.

***

West Ham played well in this game. There can't be any disputing that given the circumstances. Indeed, should anyone disagree bring them before me and we shall duel with pistols at dawn. This will, I imagine, be a lot less dangerous than it sounds given that if we're both West Ham fans I strongly suspect we'll both miss.

But here we are again basking in the glow of lost points and reduced to wondering about tomorrow, while bemoaning the caveats of the present.

We finally got an answer as to how Slaven Bilic was planning to fit all his attacking options into the team as he just selected every single one of them, and then had them all play Rock, Paper, Scissors in the changing room to determine that Cheikhou Kouyate would play the defensive midfield role.

This seemed particularly bonkers given that Burnley started with a five man midfield, but in fairness to Bilic it was all looking fairly rosy when Michail Antonio opportunistically latched on to a Joe Hart hoof to round Nick Pope and open the scoring.

I particularly enjoyed the Route One nature of the goal as you can't get caught short in midfield if you just smash it over the top of them, after all. "UEFA badges, I shit 'em" yelled Slav in celebration.

But again, in defence of Bilic the real assist on the goal belonged to Kouyate whose prodigious work rate in midfield saw him break up a Burnley attack and it was his backpass that Hart howitzered into the home half, and past the sleeping Ben Mee for Antonio to finish.

I could have sworn I had a brain in here when I left this morning

Sadly, having taken the lead in the 19th minute, we were allowed all of eight minutes of happiness, because West Ham, before Andy Carroll decided that was quite enough of that and got himself dismissed for two identical challenges in the space of 99 seconds. 

In defence of our pissed Geordie Samurai, I felt the first challenge was fairly unremarkable and was itself identical to a challenge by Burnley's James Tarkowski on Carroll just moments before which went unpunished. Several years of watching Carroll have probably inured me somewhat to the sheer physicality of his play, but I felt he was a victim of his reputation on the first yellow card. 

Having been booked however, it would generally be considered sensible to play within yourself for a while and only go into challenges where you're absolutely certain of winning the ball. Instead, Carroll brainlessly launched into another clash with Mee, leading with his arm albeit with his eyes fixed on the ball, and was rightly sent off. 

Thus, just like that, we lost the opportunity of seeing how could play with all this attacking talent on display or how we would perform with the comfort of a lead and instead had to watch yet another resilient, brilliantly organised and ultimately heartbreaking rearguard action courtesy of a frustrated front player too selfish to channel his anger into anything constructive. 

And so it was that we channelled W1A. The frustration of watching and waiting. Of knowing yet another opportunity to progress had been spurned. And now it's the same old catchphrases - "Yeah, no, sure" for "wait until we get everyone fit" and "so that's all good" for "you can't judge us with ten men". Great stuff, but can we hear something new, please, before I completely lose my shit?

We must now wait another week for a first chance to decide what we have here, and yet we're in October and other teams have long since been through all that fine tuning. So, unlucky though he might-sort-have-been, Carroll deserves nothing but opprobrium for leaving his team to spend an hour defending a lead in a game they could easily have won. 

***

I reckon the very best and worst of Slaven Bilic was on display here. 

The strength of his management seems to be very much around how he relates to his players and converting that into a loyalty towards him and the wider cause. The reason I thought Newcastle was the end for him was that it was the first time I felt I had visibly seen his team stop playing for him, in a game where they had no reason to do so. 

But, whether you agree with his team selections or the fact that he falls out with fringe players with a frequency rarely seen outside of Game of Thrones, it can't be denied that there is a resilience to his team. Here, as at Southampton, they battled gamely for over an hour with a man down and were again only denied at the death. 

I often attempt to use statistics and metrics in my analysis on here, but I think this is a weekend to abandon that in favour of some amateur psychology. Let's face it, people like me write about tactics and Expected Goals because we have no insight into what goes on in the changing room or within the team dynamic. I write about those things because it's legitimate to have an opinion about them, but when fans talk wistfully of 4-4-2 or 3-4-3 we should always remember that we know nothing really. 

We have no idea who is carrying an injury, who is in the middle of a bitter divorce, who is suffering with depression, who is in debt to local bookies, who has a family member with a terminal illness, who is trying to engineer a move away and who is little more than a drain on the morale of the wider group. All of this is hidden away from us and it's worth remembering when we clamour for the likes of Diafra Sakho to be in the team, that the dynamics of a football team probably don't differ that much from those of the office, the building site or the oil rig.

Still, in looking at Andy Carroll, it's tempting to try and figure out what is happening there. Here is a man who has gone six months - but typically, just six games - without a goal, and who had the indignity of being booed by his own fans when named Man of the Match last time out. He has seen the arrival of Chicharito and hears the jeers when the Mexican is withdrawn instead of him. 

But beyond all of that, Carroll must see the team and the players in it and realise that he is the odd man out. He can't have failed to notice how much more attractively we played yesterday after he went off, even with a man down. Twice in the early stages of the second half Michail Antonio could have doubled our lead after splendid team moves. 

The first, in particular, was a joy as we put together a move of angular precision, the likes of which we haven't seen since the Zola era and which nearly culminated in a goal that would have been a spiritual cousin to Carlton Cole's wonder strike at Wigan. 

And I think Carroll sees all of that and feels the frustration that we all do. I sympathise with him because even when we play long ball we don't do it all that well, and when we try and play shorter it doesn't really suit him. Equally, he hasn't had Lanzini to play off either, and no doubt would be looking for the Argentine to provide him some of that service he has been so sorely lacking. Indeed, we are eight games into the season and only Chicharito of our attacking royalty has been available for them all. Carroll might very well feel that he's entitled to get a crack playing alongside them all as well. 

So, it's amateur psychology alright, but if I was looking for evidence of a player frustrated and unhappy with his existence I might look at the guy who smashed into two opposition players in a minute and got himself sent off when we were 1-0 up away from home. 

***

But if the best of Bilic is seen in how his players stick with him, the worst most be in his tendency to crowbar players into the team rather than make more difficult decisions about dropping them. Antonio at right back was the start of all this but we've also seen Hernandez and Lanzini marooned out wide and today it was his deployment of Kouyate in a holding role. 

I thought Kouyate did well in the first half but it doesn't seem like the best use of his talent or mobility to deploy him this way. It also feels like it would be borderline suicidal to do this against better teams than Burnley. The dismissal of Carroll forced a change as Obiang was introduced at half time in place of Arnatuovic, who I imagine was fairly sanguine about the whole thing, and we looked far more solid from that point on. 

The problem with that was it pushed Lanzini out wide, although one would hope that was simply the necessity of the situation. But in the grander scheme of things, I would like Bilic to return to a basic stratagem of playing his men in their correct positions and only when completely, undeniably fit. 

In my rush to live and die by the merits of xG and xA metrics, it's true that from time to time I think I've forgotten some of the more intangible things in life. Confidence is a good example of this, being as how it's somewhat immeasurable but you sure as hell know when a team doesn't have it. 

Passion. But also brown shoes with a blue suit

And so it goes that I think Bilic can sometimes impinge on the confidence of his own team, simply by virtue of his apparent belief that good players can play anywhere. The irony of this is apparently lost on him, who as a rugged centre half didn't spend many games playing wide on the right.  

I like Bilic, even if I think he should have been dismissed a long time ago. He is erudite and articulate in a second language, and engaging in his manner. He doesn't seem to lean as heavily on ranting at his players or some nebulous concept like "passion", in the same way as the typical British manager. I still want him to succeed because if he does, I can at least accept that it will be enjoyable for me as a fan. That's slightly different to his predecessor Sam Allardyce, where success frequently meant further entrenchment of an already unwatchable style of play. 

But we can't complain about this result or performance. His team did him proud here, and having too many players for the spots available, and a multitude of possible formations isn't actually a bad thing. When that happens at Manchester United and Chelsea, it's considered a positive thing, after all. 

***

For all that, we rode our luck a bit here at times. Just after Carroll was dismissed, Joe Hart appeared to bring down Chris Wood with a challenge that was about as well timed as Donna Karan's defence of Harvey Weinstein. 

Referee Stuart Attwell waved that one away, perhaps still considering that he'd just sent Andy Carroll off but possibly left the referees changing room unlocked, and our luck held when a second half Gudmundson effort hit the post, then hit Hart and somehow didn't go in. 

All in all, I think we have to be happy with a point as the Burnley equaliser was deserved and a long time in the making, even if our defending looked pretty knackered by the time it went in. Winston Reid and Jose Fonte having earned the right to be exhausted by virtue of a day of dominant defensive work. 

Many seem to be pointing the finger at Aaron Cresswell for his failure to prevent the cross from coming in, but I think that ignores the fact that Arnautovic and Lanzini in front of him have the kind of work ethic that makes The Stone Roses look like Amazon employees. 

In the surge of demand for Arthur Masuaku it's surely worth remembering that he too would have nobody in front of him as cover, whilst it seems eminently likely that Bilic has told his full backs not to press too far forward as everybody else in his team is already doing that. 

***

I'll tell you what else I could do without; the now trademark Chicharito shake of the head and mini strop every time he gets substituted. While I appreciate the desire to play and the overall general lust to remain on the pitch, it's not really that egregious to take off a centre forward who hasn't scored or looked like scoring, especially when his strike partner has already been sent off for throwing an elbow around like he was trying to break the emergency glass. 

This is what Ben Mee looks like to Andy Carroll

Of course, if there is an upside to Carroll being dismissed it's that Bilic will be forced to try and find a way to play without him next week. We have those opening thirty minutes against Spurs to fall back on, as some kind of evidence that hope lies this in this direction, or at least it did until Antonio pulled damaged a hamstring and apparently also the fabric of time between the London Stadium and the Underworld and the next thing we knew we were 3-0 down to Spurs. 

Whether Bilic plays Sakho or Hernandez as the rapier point of his attack, he will surely restore Obiang to the line up for a bit of defensive ballast and deploy the others in advance of him. 

In that scenario, I see Carroll as a near perfect supersub upon his return. It's not so much that Carroll is a knife being brought to a gunfight, but that he is an old fashioned cannon from a Lord Nelson era warship. He's big, heavy, cumbersome, slow to load and absolutely deadly when you eventually get it lined up properly, but don't take too long because the other guy undeniably has something quicker. 

That kind of option off the bench could be gamebreaking against tiring defences, but the idea that he can do that from the start seems fanciful, and mostly destroyed by the evidence of 2017. If there is encouragement to be gleaned from history, one can look at the 2014/15 season when Sam Allardyce was forced into playing a diamond behind Sakho and Valencia due to injuries to Carroll and Nolan, and we were fourth at Christmas. 

That side had Alex Song in the holding role, which is a touch of quality missing from this current outfit, but you'd also think that between them Antonio, Lanzini, Arnautovic and Hernandez offer more quality than was available then. 

But we can't spend too much time looking back. This is the time to start our season and get some - any - forward momentum. Whatever Bilic does it would really be rather brilliant if it wasn't frustrating or in the style of a mockumentary. 

After all, I don't want to be frustrated any more - I want our season to start and not be waylaid by yet more setbacks and excuses. 

To paraphrase Ian Fletcher - another false start? 

Yes, no, that's not all good.