Liverpool 4 - 1 West Ham (And Other Ramblings)

"You say you lost your faith, but that's not where it's at

You had no faith to lose, and you know it"

- Bob Dylan, "Positively 4th Street"

I never admire our away support more than on days like these. On a morning when you can create clouds with your own breath and the cold can descend upon you like a blanket, it takes a certain type of person to make the trip to a fixture like this. It isn't so much that we we ended up losing this game 4-1, but that it always felt like we would lose 4-1. Not everyone can march so readily North knowing that cannon shot and thunder and Mo Salah are lying in wait. 

Even though we knew this was coming, it still stings when it happens, mind you. There is always hope until there isn't, after all. But the Premier League is becoming less competitive with each passing transfer window and each UEFA subsidy to the bigger teams. And so it is our lot to travel to places such as Anfield and play a team assembled at vast cost by cherry picking the best players from Southampton, Hoffenheim, Southampton, Bayer Leverkusen, Hull and, well, Southampton and wonder just what exactly is the point of all this. Maybe we have always been cannon fodder, but I don't remember everyone being quite so readily understanding about it. 

We haven't got Salah, or Money Money. 

It's a curious time to be a fan of a Premier League minnow. The top six are so far away now that it isn't terribly realistic to expect very much when playing them. We've lost 4-0 at Old Trafford, 4-1 here, 2-1 at the Etihad and drawn 1-1 with Spurs. We've spent roughly 80% of those games defending, earned a single point, and apart from the second half at Old Trafford - when we seemed unaware that the season had actually started - overall I think we've done alright. It's not that I don't want us to be more competitive but these are shoulder shrug games. You take what you can get, hope it doesn't get too embarrassing and then focus on next week. For fans of smaller clubs, trips to places like Liverpool are just about reaffirming our place in the established order. Four goals. Four goalscorers who cost a hundred million quid between them. Four hours drive there. For shame. 

Whether we should actually be considered as a minnow is perhaps a different question and one I'm not sure I have the energy to revisit today. Gross mismanagement and too many Sunday nights writing this blog will do that to a man. 

But to those who go and watch games like this, I salute you. It's easy to write these fixtures off as one sided and predetermined when you don't go to watch them, but when you're there in the ground it can be chastening. Of course, when you win 3-0 it can be exhilarating too, but we all know that was a beautiful aberration. At a time when we all seem very focused on what exactly constitutes a "real" West Ham fan, I think those who undertake trips such as these deserve to be foremost in our thoughts. 

***

"Cause you give it all away, you give it all away now

Don't let it come apart, don't want to see you come apart"

- Doves, "Caught By The River"

I believe that when watching a Premier League football team, if you ever arrive late for a game, you should never have to turn to a fellow fan and ask the fatal question - "Jesus Christ, is that Willie Nelson playing centre back for us?". And yet, these days, you never know at West Ham. We started this game with a back three of Aaron Cresswell, James Collins and Angelo Ogbonna and flanked them with nominal wing backs Pablo Zabaleta and Patrice Evra. That's a back line with an average age of thirty two, a Boer War veteran, one guy with rickets and three country music stars who think electric guitars are a bit fancy. 

And which one of you was supposed to be marking Mane?

The cumulative effect of our nonsensical transfer policy was laid bare here as we faced up to one of the fittest, fastest teams around with an octogenarian defence and simply dared them to run past us. And they did. Zabaleta was up against Andrew Robertson, and the Scot had the time of his life gallivanting around like a West Brom player at a Spanish taxi cab rank. On the other side, Evra fared little better and seemed to be suffering from the same disease that afflicted Zabaleta when he first arrived whereby he thought he was still playing for a Manchester side. So up he pushed, and sure enough we frequently lost the ball and the hosts exploited the gaps in behind him. I am seriously wondering if having wing backs with a combined age of sixty nine is a great idea, guys. 

In fairness, it wasn't just the defence where we struggled. Of the entire line up only Joao Mario and Manuel Lanzini were under 28 and one of them isn't even our player. I have despaired of this transfer policy for long enough that I hope you will forgive me a brief moment of schadenfreude when I say to David Sullivan - I fucking told you this was going to happen. 

And so the slowest team around played the quickest and it went pretty much as you might expect. While it's easy to be critical of West Ham, it's only reasonable to acknowledge that Liverpool are an electric side. Between Jurgen Klopp and their enormous budget, they have weapons that we simply cannot cope with, and have destroyed far better sides than us. Going forward they attack with quicksilver precision, and Salah could have scored as early as the second minute. Then we were saved by the woodwork, as the game settle into a pattern of Liverpool swarming all over us, while we tried to break with pace on the counterattack but failed to do so because breaking with pace is hard when half of your team were teenagers during Suez. 

For all that, we were not without threats of our own. Having Marko Arnautovic up front allows us the luxury of having a top six player in a bottom half team, and that is something that most of our relegation rivals cannot say. The Austrian was on his own here as Javier Hernandez was dropped for Lanzini, and had a frustrating afternoon getting annoyed that his team mates weren't a bit better. Which is saying something when you think he played with Ryan Shawcross for all that time at Stoke.

At 0-0, Arnautovic latched on to a rare decent through ball and brilliantly conjured a chip on to the crossbar from just outside the box. Loris Karius did well to tip it on to the woodwork and with that probably went our best chance of getting something from the game. Even with all of Arnautovic, Mario and Lanzini on the pitch, we struggled to keep possession and without a truly dominant central midfielder who can carry the ball and get us forward, it is bordering on impossible to ever create very much in these sort of games.

Perhaps the most disappointing thing was the way we defended, as our calling card under Moyes has been to set up with a well drilled defensive line and rely on the general excellence of our defenders to repel teams. The problem with that is it relies on us having some sort of parity further up the pitch and with Antonio on the bench and Lanzini looking every inch like he'd just returned from injury, we didn't have the necessary class to keep the ball in advanced positions.

And so it was that even though I thought we were fairly competitive in the first half, it was that special brand of competitiveness that requires you to be a fan of that particular side and be squinting very hard indeed. Football fans see positives everywhere because we are conditioned to do so. Thus, when Antonio arrived and scored immediately with a fine angled finish we all briefly began to construct a theoretical scenario in which a comeback was plausible. I thought that if ever Hernandez was going to come on, it was then, when that shaky Liverpool backline was rocking, but Moyes is glacial in his decision making and the moment passed, Mane scored the fourth, and by the time he brought him on it kind of looked like a punishment.

In the same vein, I took some positives from Zabaleta's continued Herculean efforts and conveniently ignored the way Robertson was breezing past him with alarming frequency. I similarly lauded a couple of fine Adrian saves and glossed over the remote controlled malfunction that saw him somehow being twenty yards from his goal when Roberto Firmino scored the Liverpool third. You can apparently buy drugs very easily on Merseyside, after all.

This went about as well as it looks like it would

So while we are reduced to clutching at the thinnest of straws, it's true that Liverpool were simply a great deal better than us. And while there is no doubt that we have every right to demand our team puts up a better show than this, it's also undeniable that under David Sullivan's stewardship we have gone backwards at breakneck speed. We simply aren't equipped to compete with these teams, and these kinds of results are inevitable until there is a massive overhaul of this squad by someone who knows that they are doing.

Once more, to those fans who travelled up - I salute your inexhaustible optimism.

***

"A picture is worth a thousand words"

- The Temptations, "Paradise"

The Temptations are not wrong. A pretty big game, is Swansea.

***

"They don't, they don't speak for us"

- Radiohead, "No Surprises"

Bet Bobby would have been delighted to have been associated with this

In some regards the off field antics were more interesting than the game, as both fans attempted to out-dickhead each other. Liverpool fans got in early by booing 74 year old Hammers debutant Patrice Evra, who is great to have around the place because of his terrific social media antics. He can no longer run, but we care not for such prosaic notions and with young Jose Fonte having left for the Orient, he represented a great opportunity to somehow increase the average age of our squad outside of the transfer window. 

Anyway, Evra was roundly booed all day. Home fans maintained this was because he is a former Manchester United player, except that they also kept singing Luis Suarez songs at him, meaning that they were linking the booing to the time Suarez was found guilty of racially abusing Evra and banned for eight games. So just to reiterate - they booed him for being racially abused. Wonderful humour though. 

Not to be outdone, some of our fans responded by holding up the banner above. In an era when it has become a badge of honour to tell the world how little you are offended by anything because you aren't a snowflake, I suppose that I run the risk of outing myself as hypersensitive here, but I need to say something - this banner is moronic and reprehensible. It is so stupid I had to double check that it wasn't a parody before writing this. It doesn't speak for me or any sensible West Ham fan, and the main thing it has done is set the cause of the fans march back before it's even begun. You all thought you were starting in Stratford, but instead you'll be going from Chelmsford. Bravo.

Not that I need to explain this, surely, but comparing people to Hitler is generally a pretty bad idea. Hitler is in the conversation for the worst human being who ever lived. He killed people in their millions, and there will have been people in that crowd who lost loved ones to German bombs in World War II. I am sure that the people who came up with it thought it was a pithy line but it's just crass and almost criminally stupid. Wasting a few million quid on Robert Snodgrass and Matt Jarvis isn't equivalent to waging a war, changing the club badge doesn't equate to eugenics and a failed stadium move isn't the same as systematically exterminating millions of innocent people because they are Jewish.

Don't message me with any justifications for this bullshit, or tell me it's banter or tell me it's not a comparison with Hitler because not only is it a literal direct comparison with Hitler, but it is somehow an unfavourable one. 

I am so sick of the fucking morons on our lunatic fringe who follow this club and are so much more vocal than the average punter, meaning that we literally have to say things to other fans like "Yeah, most of our supporters are great if you can just ignore the Hitler banner". 

Here is a tip for those going on the march. Your cause is just - the Board have done things for which they deserve to be held to account, and they deserve to have to face that examination in the full light of the public glare. That publicity helps the cause because external pressures can be brought to bear on the owners and a supportive media and wider football community will help affect change. Win the PR battle, and you have a head start on winning the war. 

But here's the thing - if you march singing songs about Karren Brady, or carry flags personally abusing the Sullivan family or even do something as unthinkably brainless as carry a banner comparing our Jewish chairman to Adolf Fucking Hitler, then you cede every piece of moral high ground that you might have. We are once more reduced to a rabble of hooligans and thugs who aren't worth listening to, and have nothing reasonable to say. I beg you not to take that route. Stick to the facts. The team is shit and the stadium isn't what was promised. That's plenty enough to be getting on with. 

***

"Well she wrote me a letter

Said she couldn't live without me no more"

- The Box Tops, "The Letter"

And then just as I was about to hit "Publish", Karren Brady sent a letter to the various fans groups that she met recently, ahead of the proposed march before the Burnley game. I've commented a couple of times on this before, and explained that while I understand the reasons for the march, I'm concerned that without any tangible goals or demands, it runs the risk of being a protest about nothing.

The genesis of all this was a meeting where representatives of Real West Ham Fans, KUMB, Hammers Chat, WHUISA and other groups that I can't name as I haven't seen minutes, sat down with Karren Brady and discussed a wide range of topics. The letter covers these in detail and I think it's fair to say that the club are at least taking the fan dissatisfaction seriously now, which is to the great credit of all the fan groups involved. Don't underestimate the inroads they have made through a coherent start and impressive organisation.

There is definite movement on certain demands made by fans to make the ground more like home and also a pledge to better improve communication with supporters. All of that is fine by me and a welcome move towards a more collaborative approach rather then the ludicrously adversarial tone that has been adopted in the past. There is actually quite a lot here, even if it is two years too late.

But there is a wider point too. Why did it take the threat of thousands of fans marching to get movement on something so trivial as putting up a banner honouring Billy Bonds? If it takes that type of effort to get you to engage with fans properly then I would humbly suggest that someone somewhere in the organisation needs to go on a crash course in people. You don't get to call us customers when it suits you and then totally ignore the concept of customer service. It is bananas that the club have allowed things to degenerate this far before acting.

And yet, for all the words and waffle in that letter, it is not going to be anywhere near enough to placate fans. I have a certain, limited sympathy with the Board in the sense that the fans aren't totally united and thus the disparate demands make it impossible to please everyone. There are a lot of people who are very upset that the club badge was changed, for example, while I think it's just about the dumbest possible hill to die on. I accept that my view is no more or less valid than anyone else's, and that's why I joined WHUISA and voted for people to represent me. But therein lies the problem.

Apart from Payet?

The People's Front of Judea/Judean People's Front approach means that lots of issues are getting floated by lots of different groups and it results in a letter like this, which is like a freewheeling trip through a list of minor annoyances, and summarily fails to address the two main problems that underpin everything - namely, that the team are crap, everybody knows that turning that around will be a significant undertaking, and the stadium is not up to scratch.

Now, I should also say that the letter constitutes the club's version of the action points. This doesn't mean that there weren't other things raised in the meeting, but simply that the club don't want to engage on those points. Indeed, I know for a fact that Brady was directly asked to discontinue her column in The Sun and refused, even though it was detrimental to the club during the transfer window. File that one away folks - it tells us something.

My buddy @LeBigHouse has suggested that what the fans really need is a cut throat, razor sharp shithouse of a trade unionist to lead this fight, and I'm inclined to agree. Not because the people involved aren't representing their groups well, but because we need to narrow all this down to a laser focus.

Fan questions should focus on the two areas I highlighted above: You promised us a stadium that was fit for football and you haven't delivered - what are you going to do about it? You also promised us that the stadium would allow us to generate more funds and improve the team. Why are you still allowing the owner to have a crack at this as a hobby, rather than employing qualified professionals to do the job?

That's it. That should be the agenda. Everything else is nice and I've suggested some of them myself but they are ancillary to the current situation. Small incremental gains are fine when you've exhausted the big ticket ideas, but the club haven't come remotely close to that. The Board should have watched that game on Saturday and felt a burning shame for every single minute of it. Barring one glorious accident of a season in 2015/16 when the league was upside down, they have done nothing but mire West Ham in mediocrity while spending vast sums to trail behind smaller clubs. A good team would paper over these cracks, but the bad one we've had for eighteen months is widening them.

The sole nod to this in the letter is the line "My Chairmen have also asked me to reaffirm their commitment to the restructuring of our recruitment policy as David Sullivan outlined recently...". That's it. David is going to appoint a Director of Football in the summer, at which point it will be too late to do any actual planning for the transfer window because real clubs are doing all of that now. Wonderful.

I'm not disagreeing with anything much in Brady's letter but it's all obfuscation because that's all she's allowed us. Her comments on the stadium essentially say little more than "We promise to look at this", which is a coded version of saying "I'll ask the landlord, but they're skint and we ain't paying anything so, ho hum...". Reading all of that, the temptation is to say that the reality here is that while we are tenants of the stadium, the thing that we really want - to be closer to the pitch - is not actually in their power to give us.

And this, I think, is the heart of the problem. We want to be on the touchline again, in a ground that feels like home, in the electric swirl of a pulsating football match, watching a team that is good enough to justify the move. And for all the lip service that the club may pay to those cries, it's not really in their gift to be able to do anything much about any of it. The stadium isn't ours, and the people who make the decisions about the team seem immune to any form of blame. So on we march, and up go the banners, and out come the hearses, and all the while it turns out that letting in four goals against teams like Liverpool is now the status quo. What a mess. 

A March to the Music of Failure

"There's something happening here, what it is ain't exactly clear"

- Buffalo Springfield, "For What It's Worth"

My apologies. Once upon a time this used to be a place you could come for match reports and to shake your head at an xG map and the odd Simpsons quote and that was your lot. But what I have realised over time is that if the article isn't up within forty eight hours of the game, nobody really reads them. And lately there have been a few things preventing me from writing about West Ham in a timely fashion, which means I write less about the games and instead deliver these more polemical pieces about the wider goings on at the club.

Those dark times when we had loans at usurious rates and the team was terrible and wait a minute

In my defence, this time I've been bedridden for the best part of a week with labrynthitis and trying out that Dean Martin quote about not being drunk if you can lie down without holding on. It sounds funny when Dino says it, but when you're supposed to be at work in an hour, hardly drink and you can't stop the world spinning it sounds a bit trite, let me tell you.

So anyway, Saturday came and went and was, in it's own way, brilliant.

I wouldn't say the performance was a classic, but perhaps that's the point. The thing I really like about Moyes is that we feel more like a proper team with him at the helm. So what if Watford were coming off a fantastic 4-1 win over Chelsea, and so what if we have loads of injuries and so what if it's the kind of day where the wind whips up the canals around the stadium like a razor blade - we're West Ham, and here's our well organised defence. All the best.

And so it proved, as Watford turned out to be quite depleted themselves and never really looked like they would threaten us after Javier Hernandez found himself an inch at the back post and headed home a Michail Antonio cross. The Mexican had already had a similar looking first incorrectly ruled out for offside, and Marko Arnautovic had missed a chance so good that it should have come wrapped in a bow. But while it stayed 1-0 there was always a risk, as Watford dominated possession without creating all that much, and we continued to be dangerous without quite having the necessary cutting edge ourselves to fashion a second.

So it was entirely apposite that we would eventually do so via a godawful corner that Aaron Cresswell overhit to Antonio, who in turn fell over, leaving Cresswell to smash the loose ball across goal, only for Orestis Karnezis to spill it straight back to him, and the ball to then ricochet back off Cresswell to Arnautovic to score a very nicely taken second just after squirting the keeper in the face with his plastic flower. Sometimes it is indeed better to be lucky than good.

But for all that, we were well worth our win, and after everything shook out we are five points off the relegation places and six points off seventh. This season doesn't really make all that much sense.

***

"It's only been a year, but it feels like a lifetime here

How's it been for you?"

- The Vaccines, "A Lack of Understanding"

What was perhaps the strangest thing about this game was that it was probably the first time that you could point at the awful summer transfer window and see some sense in it. Apart from the ludicrous Joe Hart signing, this is what we were promised when all that experience came through the door, waving at all the wages and transfer monies going out the other way.

Repayment instalment no:7

Pablo Zabaleta was exemplary, nary allowing the dangerous Richarlison a kick and displaying the near psychopathic levels of desire that have characterised his best performances. He remains too inconsistent for my liking, and better teams have tried and succeeded to expose him positionally, but on days like today you can see the short term merit of his signing.

Ahead of him Hernandez and Arnautovic were dovetailing nicely and, crucially, were now running the necessary miles to justify their places in the team relative to the reverse fixture at Vicarage Road. The latter, especially, was splendid and with each passing week you can see his chest puff out a little further and his standing grow with the fans. It isn't so much what he does, but it's almost more the promise of what he might do. One first half run took him past four Watford defenders in a single move and probably cemented him the Hammer of the Year trophy with that one shake of the hips. It should be Angelo Ogbonna, of course, but let's not fall out before I've even said anything remotely controversial.

There were lots of other positives; the way Cresswell and Ogbonna have shored up a leaky back four, the confidence that spreads out from Adrian like water through the roots of a tree and the manner of Mark Noble's resurgence and the way he has grabbed his threadbare team and dragged them through this most challenging of times. I have no time for the concept of the Captain in a football team, but in the last month Noble has changed my mind a little.

Also welcome was the return of Antonio who continues to combine the qualities of a thoroughbred racehorse with those of a buffalo falling down a ravine. Here, he was deployed at left wing back in a return to the darkest days of the Slaven Bilic regime but he did alright except for when he was asked to defend, and then it was like watching one of those home videos of someone painting their roof by perching a ladder on a cement mixer and attaching their paintbrush to the end of a shotgun. For all that, the brilliance of his deployment on the left was the way it matched him directly against Daryl Janmaat who also defends like a man who has never before contemplated the notion in his life.

And there you have it. This was perhaps the perfect example of what Sullivan apparently envisioned when he sat down with Bilic and decided to buy as many old, slow players as they could get their hands on. And so 34 year old James Collins kept Troy Deeney under wraps, 33 year old Zabaleta ran himself into the ground, 28 year old Arnautovic was the difference and 29 year old Hernandez is scoring goals and thus justifying his place. We were supposed to get at least of season of this short term usefulness before they all became dead weight on the wage bill and perhaps it's pretty telling that it took a different manager to Bilic to make this mess of a squad look coherent.

***

"And I would rather be anywhere else

Than here today"

- Elvis Costello, "Oliver's Army"

But if you are a West Ham fan of a certain vintage you will recognise that familiar feeling of impending doom. The uncomfortable sense that what is happening on the pitch is quickly becoming a mere supporting turn to the drama about to unfold around the club.

In my last piece I wrote about the Real West Ham Fans group and their proposed march on the day of the Burnley game. I expressed concerns, but not with a great deal of depth, and as a result I think some supporters think that I am against the march. Therefore, if you will excuse the indulgence I thought I would expand upon my thoughts here. Before I get to that, however, I should also direct you to an interview that David Sullivan carried out with the official site. It is suitably powderpuff with no meaningful questions asked, but I've pasted a couple of the money quotes here:

"You can only sign the players the manager wants and the manager must sign his own players" - Well okay then - thanks for Payet and Lanzini, Slav!

"I'm going to delegate the whole thing to a huge analysis and scouting system with a new Head of Recruitment. We'll have a massive video analysis department, increase the scouting department, every player will be looked at five or six times, we won't be signing a player when the manager's never even seen him play. The manager's going to go and watch him play and we hope we'll spend our money better"

Now if you're anything like me you read that and immediately thought "Well, what the hell was happening before?". Perhaps the most alarming piece of this is that Sullivan is still propagating this idea that the manager must have final say on all new players, and seemingly forgetting that he has parted way with four managers in his eight years here, and that when the new one arrives they all want to buy new players. Sullivan is essentially putting forward a Director of Football role that is so watered down that nobody of any repute would want it. There is no mention of reshaping the culture of the club, or a top down reorganisation of the playing structure and Academy. Instead it is all just vague murmurings that suggest he still doesn't understand the problems.

Managers, however, will be queuing up for the job as they will be racking up millions of air miles flying all over the globe looking at the hundreds of players we're considering signing. Doing that and preparing a Premier League side each week should be a piece of cake.

I shouldn't grumble too much, I suppose, as this is at least a public admission that he is part of the problem, but I'm afraid I can't get that excited. Many wiser men than me have said of this chairman that you have to judge him by what he does and not what he says, and I'm afraid that applies again here.

One last point on this before I digress further still. You could make an argument that the problem hasn't completely been about identifying good players in the last few years - it's been about signing them. The club at least floated the names of William Carvalho, Leander Dendoncker, Keita Balde, Carlos Bacca and Alexandre Lacazette but failed with their bids because the financial side wasn't up to scratch.

A new Head of Recruitment will have no impact whatsoever if he is still given an insufficient budget by Sullivan. The reality is that however far Sullivan thinks he is backing away from the process, it won't be far enough. We need him to recuse himself from the day to day running of the club and leave it to the professionals. Until that happens, this is all just window dressing.

Succinct

Which leaves the march.

Sometimes I think that as West Ham fans we have got too cosy with failure. We are too forgiving and too accepting of falling short, generally sucking it up with a phlegmatic nod to our mums and dads and granddads and telling ourselves that it has always been this way. The more glorious, the more we embrace it. The FA Cup in 2006, finishing third in 1985/86 and even the doomed Champions League hunt of 2015/16 - just to name the most recent examples. In each case we celebrate these things but know we could have grasped higher and gone further if we'd got luckier or been slightly better prepared.

But what we have experienced in the last eighteen months doesn't fit into that narrative. Losing 4-1 at home to Swansea when you have fourth place in your grasp isn't the same as being told that you're moving to a world class stadium and arriving to find that fans in the first row have to courier the ball back to the pitch when it goes out of play.

We have been failed, and that is the sound to which our fans are marching. It's a march to the music of failure.

Personally, I would build up to a march because this is a long game now, and a march is a blunt force instrument that doesn't seem all that well suited to achieving the disparate aims that exist within the fanbase. Some want the board gone, some want them to step back, some want us to find a new stadium and some want a new badge. And that is the problem - I don't know what the march is for. I want to back it, but I'm not marching for a new badge because that's mad.

I've been discussing this with some other supporters and their thinking is that it doesn't matter whether the march has coordinated aims but instead it's there as a show of strength and a statement that enough is enough. Something has to change and here are twenty thousand people in support of that position. And fair enough - God knows I've spent long enough outlining why I agree.

But here's the thing - a march of twenty thousand people is an incredible endeavour. It's a seriously impressive piece of organisation, and not least because there is money behind it too, pledged by the people involved. But you can't waste that firepower by setting off with no aim in mind. If you march for lots of things, I think you march for nothing. Sullivan and Gold will draw the curtains and ignore it. And while the eyes of the world will be on the march I'm not sure it's going to really take hold in the public consciousness when the protest song is:

"What do we want - quite a lot of stuff really and some of it is quite contradictory
When do we want it - NOW!"

I'm not trying to undermine or belittle anyone marching - genuinely - but when this appears in the media it's not going to make sense to anyone outside West Ham, and while we might not think that matters it's actually pretty important. Each of Sullivan, Gold and Brady are desperate for public approval. An incoherent message hurts us and strengthens them.

Personally I would have built up to a march. A red card protest, a black balloon protest, some well placed newspaper think pieces about those accounts when they come out, a turning the back moment from our away following - suddenly these things are in every match report and instead of the West Ham board, they are the "embattled" West Ham board, the "under fire" West Ham board, the "besieged" West Ham board. At that point it's not whether change will come, it's what change will come.

But that's gone now and the march is the way forward and I support everyone on it, I truly do. My own view is that regime change is a very risky proposition because, incredibly, there are owners out there who make Sullivan and Gold look like Sheik Mansour, but I accept that the vast majority disagree with me. And if that's the case - then make that the aim of the march and let the cards fall where they may. Their handling of the stadium move alone means they deserve every bit of opprobrium that comes their way.

And whatever anyone thinks of the march, it can't be denied that these owners have failed us and we do deserve better. West Ham deserves better. We might have been allowed glorious failure to be baked into the DNA of the club but it doesn't always have to be that way. We can and will achieve more than these owners have allowed us.

***

"She'll carry it on through it all"
- The Stone Roses, "Waterfall"

But amidst all this gloom, I should also say that I see light. I was given a small reminder of that before this game, as my ten year old and I were running along the various impenetrable waterways that protect the London Stadium as though designed by the architect of a medieval castle. We were delayed by TfL, as usual, and the rain was pouring in sideways and reddening our faces as the familiar pre match music was creeping like mist over the stadium roof.  Then "Bubbles" came on as we jogged up to security, and in that moment my daughter turned to me and started singing along, hands in the air and a big grin on her face. Not for her any worries about the lack of pace in our defence, or the rates of interest that we pay on our loans, or the badge that adorns the front of her Cheikhou Kouyate shirt, but a simple expression of joy at the fact that the next two hours were loaded with possibility.

And of course, that's how it should be. The fight that we are in as fans is just as transient as those who own our club. West Ham will prevail because it always does, and because our club exists not in balance sheets or Premier League money tables or even the London Stadium. It lives instead in the side streets and school playgrounds, and hospital wards and pub saloon bars and on bedroom walls and in the arms of ten year old girls who hear "Bubbles" and immediately start singing it, even in the teeth of a howling gale. 

And that is what our fans are marching for.

The acknowledgement that our club exists for reasons other than to make money for people who don't have the ability to take the club forward, but are instead content to leave us in a state of failing inertia in order to pad the growth of their investment. And while I might not completely agree with the tactics of those fans, I absolutely understand and empathise with their frustration. To dismiss it as the actions of hotheads is to fail to understand the tinderbox atmosphere that exists between us and the owners. These latest noises from Sullivan and Gold are therefore too little too late. They ignored us for too long and at their peril, and we will take our club back because we will outlast them. For that reason I don't object to the leaders of the Real West Ham Fans group meeting with the Board before the march. That was the whole purpose of the group in the first place, I thought.

But the wider concern I have is what exactly it is that some people seem to think they will be getting back. Which of the fifteen versions of the club badge is the acceptable one? If wishes were plastic seats we still won't be able to raise the ashes of the Chicken Run from the Upton Park dirt. Pray as we might, but Geoff Hurst isn't going to lead the line at Liverpool.

West Ham fans have to start looking forward and asking for things that are actually achievable and meaningful. Off the top of my head:

- The immediate installation of a fully qualified Director of Football, who is given complete control of the playing affairs of the club. The current chairmen will step down from whatever day to day involvement they have in the football side of the club.

- Elected supporter representatives on the board to hold the club to account.

- Those loans fixed at commercial rates and no higher.

- Regular dialogue with supporter groups to address the myriad problems with the stadium and an end to this fiction that everything is ok while the roof is literally leaking over our heads. Everything at present is reactionary and coated in the gleam of self denial.

- If fans believe that the club has lost touch with it's past then it really isn't that difficult to fix. Celebrate better the achievements of our past: Pick selected matches to specifically cherish and promote any of the following:  the first three black players in a top flight English side - Clyde Best, Clive Charles and Ade Coker; the 1975 European Cup Winners Cup Runners Up; Ron Greenwood; Vic Watson; Steve Potts; the West Ham Academy - whatever, really. In some ways it doesn't matter what you remember, so long as you're remembering.

There is a difference between endlessly looking backwards in the hope of recreating a mythical past that didn't even exist then and standing on the shoulders of giants to move the club forward. I'm not advocating a weekly nostalgia session to distract ourselves from what's in front of us, but more an effort to make our rented accommodation at least seem a little more like home. It really wouldn't be that tricky to get giant banners of Watson, Lampard Sr, Bonds and Greenwood in the four corners of the ground would it?

So you might agree with all that or none of it, but the point I'm trying to make is that an effort to make the London Stadium seem like home, and pulling our history closer to our fans shouldn't be that difficult. In fact, none of this stuff really feels that difficult if you've truly got the interests of the club at the centre of your agenda.

And as for the march, I hope it yields some positive results. And as always, perhaps the best advice comes from Diamond Joe Quimby:

The Sound and The Fury

"What happened to ya?

We were one of a kind"

- Ian Brown, "What Happened to Ya? Pt 1"

This article started life as a match report of the game between West Ham and Crystal Palace. That was in January when life was simple and we were a top half team. Then circumstance took over and it has morphed somewhat. Of course, things were different back then. West Ham wasn't a racist club. People at the club seemed aware that we needed new players. Han Solo was Harrison Ford.

But so much has gone under the bridge that as I tried to write this piece I felt like a man using an umbrella to try and catch a fish; wholly unsuited to the task and unable to keep up. I've been abroad with no access to this account so I couldn't post up this piece, and yet with every passing hour it mattered less because the content was rendered obsolete by further developments. I honestly didn't think a club could dissemble this quickly without Mike Ashley being involved.

And now all we hear is sound, and every where we turn is fury. All of which leads inexorably to one simple question:

What has happened to my club?

What. Has. Happened. To. My. Club?

Perhaps it has always been this way. Maybe when other fans were telling us that we were their second team, they weren't simply saying it because of our helpful tendency to play nice football and at the same time roll over for them. I'm now wondering if that faint praise and those half smiles merely disguised a sense of being thankful that it wasn't them. Not for them the constant threat of humiliation and embarrassment. That was our sole preserve.

It is the lot of football club owners that fans will generally always hate them. Supporters place no limit on our ambition, and demand that owners follow our lead. But they are bound by such inanities as money and overdrafts and cashflows and rules and the realities of trying to keep such febrile businesses afloat. I don't doubt that running a football club properly is a job that demands high levels of skill and competence, perhaps outstripping a regular business because those enterprises do not come under such high levels of public scrutiny over every single decision they take.

Next Level

But is anyone still labouring under the misapprehension that West Ham is a well run football club? Surely even those who refuse to see anything wrong with our leadership so long as they make the crossed Hammers can't call me a Quisling for suggesting that they could be doing their basic tasks a little better than they currently are?

It is February and with the team bereft of fit players due to our annual injury crisis, the Board have allowed five players to leave the squad and brought just two in. They have made our squad smaller at a time when our Premier League place is not remotely secure and when our medical staff appears to be unable to stem the constant flow of injured players. And yet all of that garden variety incompetence doesn't even make the top three things they fucked up most on deadline day.

No, instead we have other crises to manage, namely the insinuation from our (newly minted) Head of Transfers, Tony Henry, that we no longer wished to purchase African players and then the revelation that Leicester will simply not do business with us due to some inane public comments from Karren Brady in her Sun column.

The beauty of this is that at the same time Henry was allegedly emailing out this "club policy" about African players to agents, the deal that was scuppered with Leicester was for the Algerian forward, Islam Slimani. We apparently can't even be racist properly.

And so it came to pass that West Ham fans must once again ponder why our club should always be so different. All fans love to feel they are hard done by, but telling people you support West Ham nowadays invokes an involuntary sense of sympathy from fellow supporters. They might not know the intimate details - the failure to qualify for the League Cup semi final because we forgot a player was cup tied, the requirement to pay Sheffield United £20m for the Tevez saga despite their being no legal grounds for it, the record signings who get injured on debut, the homesick player from Oxford, the preternatural gift for identifying soon to be bankrupt sponsors - but in a way, that doesn't matter. In the style of the Trump White House, it has ceased to be relevant what the drama is so long as there is some drama to distract fans.

We have been overwhelmed by a cavalcade of uselessness.

***

"We got to pump the stuff to make us tough,

From the heart"

- Public Enemy, "Fight the Power"

Before all of this happened we actually took a break from causing incredulity and played a game of football. That seems like a quaint nod to a bygone era now, like MTV playing a music clip or Government ministers being competent, and yet it does actually remain the primary activity of West Ham United. 

Crystal Palace were in town and they arrived with a fair wind behind them. Since Roy Hodgson took over, they have been surging, with their results finally catching up to the underlying analytics which have suggested all season that they were a good team underperforming. 

With the squad decimated, Moyes was forced to improvise and so we saw Pablo Zabaleta deployed into midfield and new signing Joao Mario given licence to roam widely in support of the lone striker, Chicharito, and both did all we could have asked of them. Historically the Mexican has been incapable of performing that role but here he battled and worked and generally did everything that he could to hold back the tide. Behind him Mark Noble and Cheikhou Kouyate stepped manfully into the breach and combined with Zabaleta to take the fight to the visitors, and if we were somewhat fortunate to be on level terms at half time, that engine room drove us forward to a surprisingly progressive second half display. 

Legend

I have latched on to Noble somewhat on recent weeks, as a kind of emotional life raft in the roiling sea of being a West Ham supporter. Because the owners are so rarely incapable of projecting a positive image of our club, we are forced to look elsewhere for things to be proud about and Noble couldn't be making me prouder right now. 

Forget the longevity and the fact he is a Hammers fan, because those things are nice but they aren't all that relevant. Instead focus on the way he cares. Focus on how he carries himself. Focus on how he represents our club on and off the pitch. As a footballer Noble is having his own resurgence as his experience and ever excellent technical ability allows him to continue controlling games from the middle of the park. But off the pitch he is also everything that this club is supposed to be. He is devoted to his community and an exemplar of how to treat others and give something back to the people who make up West Ham United, whether it's through his soccer schools or his housing project or just the simple ability to talk about football fans with a scintilla of empathy. 

At a moment when those who lead our club off the pitch routinely make me ashamed, Noble and his footballing brothers have found a way to restore my faith in the badge by what they do between the lines (you're probably correctly guessing here that this bit was written pre-Brighton). Here they were, battered and tired and with their numbers depleted by boardroom incompetence and yet they more than matched a tough opponent. It hasn't always been the case, but when you take a step back and view this match as dispassionately as possible, our players did us proud. 

Supporting Noble was Kouyate, who suffered a nasty head injury early on and returned as the second coming of Ian Bishop. He suddenly found a passing range, and began dominating the game in a way I haven't seen him do before. His astute pass found Chicharito just before half time, from which he and Mario fashioned a chance which was only interrupted by a James Tomkins foul. 

Penalty. Noble. You knew he wouldn't let us down. 

In the context of what was to later be revealed, it was stirring to see the return of Kouyate to his best form. We need his rangy athleticism and ability to, well, cause mayhem from central midfield in the absence of our more artisanal forwards. How ironic that our best ever African player should be so instrumental in leading the team to this crucial point. 

Mario looked lost to start but grew into a physical and frenetic game that saw possession routinely coughed up by both sides with startling frequency. The Portuguese conjured a lovely pass to free Chicharito for the penalty and generally looked the kind of quick witted, intelligent footballer who will link beautifully with Manuel Lanzini and Marko Arnautovic if they are ever all fit at the same time. I also enjoyed that his first touch involved him dribbling straight out of play while Moyes looked on, bemused. Levity amid the gloom. 

But the true calling card of Moyesian football seems to be the ability to construct a rock solid defence from the softest of materials. Here he was shorn of yet more bodies and he merely shrugged and rearranged the deckchairs to keep the Titanic afloat. So Aaron Cresswell went back out wide and reminded us all that he crosses with the consistency of a chicken on a High Street, and in came eighteen year old Declan Rice to the middle of the back three and nobody really batted an eyelid. Palace helped us out there somewhat, by channelling almost all their attacking play through the electric Wilfried Zaha. The Ivorian is one of those players who makes you inch forward involuntarily when he gets the ball, even as you're encouraging Sam Byram to kick him. And to be fair, Byram did, repeatedly. 

But generally we swarmed Zaha when he got the ball and on the one occasion that Palace didn't go through him, Andros Townsend surged to the byeline and crossed for Christian Benteke to head the opening goal. Had they done this a little more often we might have had a tougher evening, but as it was the visitors were indebted to Wayne Hennessey for a terrific save from a second half Chicharito header to keep things level. A point was, all things considered, a pretty fair result.

And then we went to Brighton, and I didn't see that game because I was overseas and sometimes you just have to be grateful that the Universe has been kind to you.  

***

"You thought I was cheap, you were the sale of the century, 

Creased ourselves up on the way down"

- Sleeper, "Sale of the Century"

And so as we all drifted away through the thin sheen of rain that covered the stadium like mist, the talk turned to the transfer deadline. They've got to do something, we thought. Kudos to Moyes and the boys for that performance, we all thought, but now they need help. 

Of course, I should say that such thoughts go against the grain for me. I don't like David Sullivan buying anyone because he doesn't understand football, but I particularly don't like him buying anybody in January because he doesn't seem to understand footballing economics either. So, after a history that includes Mido, Benni McCarthy, Robert Snodgrass and Nene, and public commentary from both Sullivan and Brady that they considered these transfers as failures, it felt natural that we should want the club to sit this window out. After all, they couldn't make any stupid decisions if they didn't make any decisions. 

But the other hallmark of the club in recent years has been the chronic failure to keep our playing staff fit. Whatever the club is doing in this regard is not working and it tends to have an overwhelmingly negative impact on the handwritten scrawl on the back of a lottery ticket that our owners laughably call our business plan. 

Not only do we drop points due to the weakened sides we constantly have to field, but it has caused the Board to act rashly in trying to plug the gaps. Hence they spent £10m of this summer's budget on Snodgrass when they really only needed him for a few games to cover a player shortage last January, and now they can't even recall him from Aston Villa to do the same this year. 

A poor signing, treated poorly

But what was different last year was the context of our league position and the fact that we were just about to emerge from our injury crisis. We enjoyed a brief revival to lift us up the table and by the time that Fonte and Snodgrass arrived it was already pretty evident that we were not going to be relegated. Thank God for Sunderland. 

But this year is different, with a whole glut of similar teams all scrabbling around for the same few points, and our playing resources likely to be paper thin for a while yet. As it happens, I think Moyes gives us an advantage over those other teams, but our injuries have reduced his options to the point that we couldn't name a full substitutes bench at Huddersfield. This was not a window in which to suddenly decide to keep our powder dry, and such inertia could prove fatal. Sullivan has taken a huge risk. 

And so it was that we came limping into the deadline having failed to do anything beyond add Joao Mario on a loan and Jordan Hugill from Preston North End. I have no issue with the purchase of Hugill, particularly as he has come from Preston and will have been properly scouted by Moyes and Alan Irvine as a result. In a time when English clubs are awash with money, and previously unheralded overseas leagues are churning out good players at higher rates than ever, it is entirely possible that divisions like the Championship and the Scottish Premier League are once again the best place to get value for money. And lest we forget, Cresswell, Michail Antonio and Dele Alli all came from somewhere.

Hugill is perhaps a little older than we might like, at twenty five, but he should know his own game and has already demonstrated a considerable amount of fortitude in rising from the Glen Hoddle Academy to the Premier League. In a team with our problems, I see no issue with adding a player prepared to run himself into the ground, and if he fails, then he is young enough to be resold in a year or two for some sort of return. He is, in that sense, the very antithesis of Benni McCarthy.

Tattoo sleeve, beaming smile. You'll do, son, welcome aboard

The problem with the signing is not with the player but the context. With Diafra Sakho finally gone, and scoring against PSG immediately, we were already light up front. Thus the sale of Andre Ayew for £18m was baffling on a number of levels. 

Ayew is, by my estimation, the only footballer under thirty whose value has dropped in the last two years. At a time when Moussa Sissoko costs £30m and £20m is an opening offer for pretty much every Premier League player, we are once more selling our players into a totally different market then we buy from. This is the problem when we feel the need to offer such astronomical wages to attract players to West Ham in the first place. While the owners might think that having the thirteenth largest wage bill in Europe is a sign of ambition, most others see it as a sign of chronic inefficiency and it makes players very hard to shift without reducing their transfer fees drastically. We have fallen into the age old trap of paying players for what they have done elsewhere rather than what they will do for us. Say what you will about Hugill, he will earn his money through his performances in claret and blue. Ask yourself if that could really be said about Joe Hart. 

So off went Ayew, Sakho, and Toni Martinez and if anything happens to Chicharito on Saturday then we go to Liverpool with our line being led by Preston's striker. It's a curious time to be alive, no?

***

"How could it ever come to pass? She'll be the first, she'll be the last

To describe the way I feel"

- The Stone Roses, "She Bangs The Drums"

All of which is skirting around the main issue, which can be simply laid out in the question I asked above, namely "What the hell is happening to my club?"

Rumours have swirled around for days now about why we are losing players when we need to add them and why we would be apparently offering ludicrously low amounts to try and pry players away. Those rumours range from the owners asset stripping in preparation for a sale to both HMRC and criminal investigations into our transfers, via a massive cashflow issue to straight up incompetence - the latter still being my best guess. 

I understand that transfers are complex and hard to get done, but so are brain surgeries and you don't get to have a go at them because you bought a private hospital. Fans are furious, and while that might not always have a basis in rational thought, I happen to agree that if nothing else, we deserve better than we are currently getting. We shouldn't kid ourselves that our reputation was glittering when they took over, but we were promised that with Karren Brady and her ultra professional stewardship we could look forward to a rehabilitation of our public image. 

Instead, they have stumbled from crisis to crisis, stopped off to get into a slanging match with Sporting Lisbon, fallen out with their own players, while slating some we haven't even bought and topped all that by alienating the entire taxpaying population of the country. It might wind us all up, but Jack Sullivan's Twitter account is pretty small beer. 

Goodbye

On March 10th the Real West Ham Fans Group are planning to march on the Club, and while I don't really agree with the action I understand it wholly. The burning sense of frustration that is searing through the West Ham support has been grossly underestimated by those in the boardroom. "Wait until the next transfer window" might suffice for the apparently tepid self examinations that pass for Board meetings but that is no comfort to fans driving back from Wigan into a howling gale and wondering why they just surrendered their Saturday for a club that can't help but give off the signal that it despises them.

And now.

Now somehow we have plumbed new depths. Tony Henry's comments made his position untenable. He may have been stitched up by the Mail, the last bastion of anti-racism, but his apparent confusion about why his comments were a problem didn't show that he wasn't being racist, but instead showed that he didn't understand how he was being racist. That's not the same thing. Our club, the first English top flight team to have three black players, does not need such people in it's employ. 

And what it all highlights is the total shambles that is our corporate governance. Henry doesn't want African players but we still try and loan Slimani on deadline day. He doesn't think Russian players settle very well in England and still we try to get Fyodor Smolov until the player calls it off because he thinks his club are being lowballed. 

Best of all is Henry's concern about how well Italian players adapt when our player of the season so far is literally an Italian of African descent. When Cheikhou Kouyate posts an Instagram picture with the caption "African and Proud" then the club must surely understand that this is beyond their agency to stage manage. You don't get to tell people how they feel. Henry is gone, but significant questions remain. 

Ade Coker and Clyde Best (and Clive Charles). Heroes - let's learn our own history

And as an aside, perhaps if the club properly celebrated men like Clyde Best, Ade Coker and Clive Charles a little more obviously, instead of constantly regaling us with tales of a team who finished third, then their employees and fans might be a little more attuned to the relevance of racism in our history. And yes, I realise being black is not the same as being African, but I think we're in the same territory here.

Overriding all of that is the concern about who else knew about Henry's "policy" and why he was talking to the press without apparent supervision. As the lads at Hammers Chat pointed out, Sullivan has been keen to play up links to Henry in the past:

That's vague enough to allow Sullivan to say he was unaware, but if he was then it really doesn't reflect well on a structure that can allow such activity from a senior employee to go unnoticed. This, of course, is the problem with an owner who only wants association with successful transfers. There is a huge hole where a proper, functioning Sporting Director or Director of Football would sit. And you all know where I'm going with that. 

As for Karren Brady and her inane column in The Sun, I remain confused as to why this is even a thing. Sullivan's assertion that he would have to pay her more if he didn't let her go off and write for Murdoch, shill for Alan Sugar, help out Philip Green and sit in the House of Lord's doesn't really hold up to scrutiny when she's getting £900,000 a year from us. 

Either way, our Karren sure can pick her business associates. 

I wonder what Brady's own position would be if a West Ham employee cost the club a transfer due to an artless thought posted online or in a newspaper. I suspect they'd be gone before they could yell "what about slapping women?" through the window. 

I've defended Brady many times because I think she is criticised primarily by a lot of West Ham because she is a woman, and for no other reason. In this case, she cannot be defended. Her desire for fame seems to outstrip her desire to do a good job for us. That's a problem. 

Which brings us back to that march by the Real West Ham Fans group. As I mentioned, I don't particularly agree with this initial course of action, because it feels like dropping a nuclear bomb as your opening gambit, but that's up to them. I also can't help but concede that they are probably right to think this is the best way to motivate change. But it's a specific problem for the board now. They are toxic and their constant failures are magnified by the media storm they insist on creating around the club. The problem when you're so desperate for attention is that you don't get to duck out when that attention is negative. Where we once went for the Cearns Family and Terry Brown, now it is the current owners, and once that particular rock starts rolling it will be nearly impossible to stop. 

I don't want to reach the position where the owners and their families are being abused at games, but it's also possible to see why fans don't feel they have any choice but forceful protest. All of the purported fan engagement ideas of the last few months have led nowhere meaningful. The club is still run disastrously, and we are regressing at an alarming rate. A change has to come. It has to.

I would call once again for the owners to step back and disappear from the spotlight. Hire a Director of Football and give that person carte blanche to modernise the Club. Send the Sullivan boys to German clubs where they can learn their trade at the cutting edge, and not by serving coffee in our club cafe, if it truly is the intention that they are going to one day run this club.

Have Karren Brady reduce her extra curricular efforts and focus her energies on West Ham as a community enterprise. Let's see her turn those formidable talents that we hear so much about and see so little of, to endeavours that matter to fans - Isla's Fight would be an easy cause to pick up and gain ground with fans, so too the long term funding for the Supporters Club, or engaging with WHUISA on all sorts of fan matters. She might argue that she does that already and I might argue that I wouldn't know because I only ever hear about her doing things that are nothing to do with my club.

And that, after all, is what this is all about. This club will endure because it always has, but I find it hard to grasp how badly our owners are currently letting us down. When a player can walk over to the travelling support after a defeat at a promoted club and ask where the money has gone, you know things are bad. The manager deserves scrutiny too, of course, especially as we seem incapable of defending against weaker sides, but the backdrop to all of this seems to be a boardroom culture of incompetence that is suffocating all else inside the club.

So, back to my question, because we are running out of time to get a satisfactory answer. 

What is happening to my club?