West Ham 0 - 3 Burnley (And Other Ramblings)

"I long to feel, some beauty in my heart 

As I go searching, right to the start"

- Doves, "Kingdom of Rust"

I often wonder about these articles. What value do they serve, really, beyond allowing me to engage in something I like to do? They have become unrelentingly grim, with gloom painted over them like miserable graffiti and the gallows humour that I promised myself I would always try to thread through them is as long gone as Dimitri Payet.

I have no idea if Karren Brady is aware of The H List, but if she is I strongly suspect that she thinks it's just someone pissing into the tent, and I suppose from her perspective that might be true. Which led me to thinking about what I would do now if I were her. "Resign" is certainly an option there, but I have worked long enough in the City of London to know that people don't generally leave million pound a year jobs for silly little reasons like not being good at them.

Another day, another disaster

Which got me to thinking about my own career and what I would bring to West Ham as a Director. "Not much" is the answer there, but once upon a time I did have a role whereby I helped manage a team of a couple of hundred people. It was as challenging as you might expect, with my responsibility specifically covering personnel issues. I suspect that this was primarily to keep me away from doing any technical work, but in that role I learned a lot about people. And specifically I learned one very valuable life lesson; namely that you don't get to tell others how they feel. 

I lost count of the amount of times I heard junior staff tell their superiors something along the lines of "You make me feel undervalued when you only ever focus on my failings" and then hear a reply that began with the phrase "No, that's not true". See how that goes? You're wrong, you don't feel like that, have another go. 

And I have returned to this again and again this weekend. On some very deep, subterreanean level I do actually feel sympathy for Brady and the Board - they are trying to make a group of people happy who have a completely disparate set of desires. As my fellow Hammers blogger Alex V astutely pointed out, how on earth do you placate a fanbase who want a more modern approach to running the club while simultaneously demanding a return to traditional values? How do you reconcile people like me who think they waste money constantly, with those who sing "where's the money gone?"

But you know what? That's the gig. And it's absolutely the gig when you turn a football club upside down in pursuit of a dream that you sold and then didn't deliver on. Thus, for two years both our elected and unelected representatives have been telling Brady these problems and been repeatedly told that they were wrong. 

You're wrong, you don't feel like that, have another go. 

And this is why they fail. 

They fail because they seem incapable of dealing with us on a basic human level. I appreciate that lots of fans like the London Stadium and are far more concerned with the bloody awful team, but there are also lots of us who feel misled and lied to about the whole thing. And still we hear in the accounts about this wonderful, world class arena that we play in and all I can think about is Alan Partridge pointing out that there was over a thousand miles of very pleasurable cruising before the Titanic hit that iceberg.

They're scum, Karren, sub human scum.

All admissions of failure seem to be couched somehow in terms of the failure of others. Problems with the stadium begin with the landlord, issues with the team seem to swing between the likes of Jose Fonte and Robert Snodgrass, before eventually landing on the head of Slaven Bilic, and if all of that doesn't land then there is always bad luck. The accounts speak of an "unprecedented injury crisis" which is a statement you could only make if you had literally never seen West Ham play before.

Even now, the fans are somehow to blame for the team losing 3-0 to Burnley, and not the fact that this squad was assembled by randomly throwing darts at a 2012 Panini sticker album. 

Karren, I know you don't want my advice, but I shall offer it up anyway because I know no other way to help my club. Treat us like human beings. Hear what we have to say, but also listen to it. Approach discussions with fans with the baseline that the stadium move has not delivered what an awful lot of us wanted. Instead of telling them why they're wrong, let them tell you why you're wrong, and then see if that spirit of cooperation can carry you any further than getting a few flags waving around the edge of the pitch before the match. I actually thought that was a nice touch and inspired an interesting discussion about our history with my daughter, but that's scant consolation when Joe Hart is scrabbling around like a fish on a chessboard, and the temporary scaffolding is bending and warping with the weight of angry protesters.

And when you do all of that, and reach the inevitable conclusion that the rest of us got to some time ago - namely that the stadium simply cannot be fit for purpose as a football ground, because it wasn't designed to be - then you need to march up to David Sullivan and tell him that you're going to publicly admit as much and demand that he therefore better find a way to improve the team post haste.

I get that your entire brand is built around infallibility but none of this is going to disappear like you hope it will. West Ham is the Not OK Corral, and you need to acknowledge your own part in that, if you want to have any hope of moving us forward. As it is, I have never felt so disconnected from my club.

After all, you don't get to tell me how I feel. 

*** 

"There's a place where time is dead, and all things stand still

And always will"

- The Handsome Family, "If The World Should End In Fire"

But let us start at the beginning, before the mercury rose and the citadel was stormed. I went to this game in search of faith. A glimpse of a renewed faith in the game I have spent so much time with, and in those people that I have watched it with. Truthfully, it felt like a blessed relief to be going to a match, and not wondering about marches, fans being attacked by their brethren or what new bombshell was going to be dropped in our collective laps. Even then, we must not forget that there are those of our regimental stripe who couldn't attend this game for fear of their own safety, for shame.

But the sun was out and it truly felt like I hadn't watched West Ham play with the sun on my face for years. And for an hour, whisper it, I thought we were the better team. The side still looked disjointed and hastily thrown together - because they are - but there were things to commend here. We went at Burnley with all the vim and vigour that was missing last week, and duly caused them some problems. Marko Arnautovic, Manuel Lanzini and Joao Mario all had chances, but couldn't quite get the perfect look. Such is the nature of Burnley. They are defensive magicians. They are also the most cynical time wasters in the division. Their players spent the entire game feigning head injuries in an attempt to slow the game down and I'd love to say I'd never seen anything like it except they did the exact same thing last year.

Yet for all our flimsy superiority, you always got the sense that - much like a night time stroll in Romford - there was trouble waiting around the corner. Burnley haven't got to their lofty heights by accident. Their success has been built upon a seemingly unsustainable combination of forcing their opponents to miss good chances, and taking their own lesser ones. And falling over a lot. They have almost broken the Expected Goals model, and serve as a salutary reminder that while people like me would reduce the sport to an algorithm, the game itself still remains as gloriously unpredictable as an errant firework. 

West Ham - building character since 1895

And so Dyche introduced Chris Wood after an hour and watched as the Kiwi was immediately involved in two goals within five minutes. The first was offside apparently, but should have been defended better either way. It unfolded like a slow motion replay as Angelo Ogbonna dallied where Wood was purposeful and picked out Ashley Barnes, who took a brief break from throwing himself to the floor to power the ball past Joe Hart's famously vulnerable left hand. The problem with weaknesses is that people will keep exploiting them until you prove they no longer exist. And this one still exists.

There was still time to dream of a renaissance, but by now the gates of Hell had swung open. At one down, against the league's best game killers, we were deep in the mire even before the pitch invasions began. Moyes responded to Dyche outwitting him with a typically late and ineffective substitution. On came Javier Hernandez, and still the visitors kept running straight through the middle of our Papier-mâché midfield. Where have you gone Pedro Obiang? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. 

Hart soon fumbled a long range effort and a third went in. I threw my eyes upwards in search of that long departed sun, or maybe the ghostly silhouette of Alan Pardew being projected on to the night sky as our owners turned on their own version of the Bat signal. Now I think about it, that might constitute gallows humour if it wasn't for the fact that the useless bastards might actually bloody do it.

***

"Oh baby, oh baby

Then it fell apart"

- Moby, "Extreme Ways"

But what of the real story? I wrote a short piece for The Guardian in which I was constrained by a word limit. Some picked me up for only saying that "I cannot condone the violence" so let me say here that I condemn it completely. How could anybody not? The fighting in the seats behind the dugouts was so bad that kids had to be ferried forward to the Burnley benches for shelter. These were, I believe, the £5k a year seats where West Ham fans fought each other over I don't even know what. Hope truly does lie in the proles.

Elsewhere, there were four separate pitch incursions which all ended with some form of physical altercation either with players or in the stands after the invaders had returned. The first guy came on holding an A4 poster. This is like holding up a postage stamp to Neil Armstrong while he walked on the moon - it could have said "Wenger Out" for all I know. Having done all of Cheikhou Kouyate's running all day, Mark Noble then appointed himself Chief Steward as well and roughed the guy up. Some think he was wrong, but what I saw was a frustrated man who knew that once pitch invasions start, the team rarely comes back. And true enough we kept conceding goals as various miscreants made their way on, each showing a surprising amount of stamina to make it all the way to the middle.

I don't blame the fans, but anyone who was there can't deny that as soon as the atmosphere turned, the team simply wanted to get out of Dodge. And for those who remember the Bond Scheme protests of the early Nineties, you'll know what I mean when I say that a decent team can rarely coexist with a poisonous atmosphere. Try as we might, that toxicity drips out on to the pitch - or is carried there atop a corner flag - and infects the players. We must remember that they will be gone after all of this, mercenaries caught in the middle of a blood feud. Instead it is us who will remain, silently watching us lose to Barnsley in the Thunderdome and wondering if relegation was truly a price worth paying to vent our frustrations.

But I am getting ahead of myself, because relegation will assuredly not be the fault of the fans, even if some in the media would wish to say it was. Those who protested had every right to do so. I can't understand the desire to go on the pitch, although I surely recognised the homage to the famous Everton invasion against the Bond Scheme. Once again we were shaking hands with the past, and invisible bridge between eras, with the only constant being that the club is still run by spivs and charlatans.

Shaking hands with the past. It's shit here, they both said

But the real spirit of the protest lay in those those who gathered in front of the Director's Box and confronted the architects of this demise. In reality, the situation was horrible, even if I believe that this was entirely caused by a Board who have insisted on chipping away at the foundations of our club and are now finding that the debris is falling squarely on their own heads.

I will say that I hate that Sullivan's children had to face that. Even if they might be too prominent for their tender years, it is indeed worth remembering that they are just kids who didn't deserve to have objects thrown at them and to hear their father abused. They are fans too, remember. Similarly, David Gold was there with his daughters and grandchildren and reportedly left in tears. None of us should be happy about that, nor can we condone those who threw objects. To do so is to cede the moral high ground. There is no need for it. We are on the side of the angels.

But before you think I've changed my mind, let me say once more that this was brought upon themselves. I have previously described the relationship between the fans and the owners as being like a pressure cooker, and the thing with those is that you need a way to release that pressure before it explodes. West Ham fans have got no traction with the club over our complaints, which ultimately culminated in the threat of a protest march. Only then, with that ludicrously sharp Sword of Damocles hanging over their head, did the board deem our points worthy of an audience. Two years and ten thousand marchers to get some flags around the pitch. It's like Agamemnon sacking Troy for a loaf of bread.

But by organising the cancellation of the march, the club skilfully moved the protest into the stadium, for where else could it go? And now the genie is out of the bottle, he won't be returning. The fans might not know exactly what it is they want, but they can say with certainty that it is not this. And yet, I am not among those who subscribe to the view that relegation might not be a bad thing. It will set the club back years, and destroy our finances. If you're annoyed at the interest payments to the owners now, wait until we're in the Championship and can't borrow against our TV money, meaning we have to get it from Sullivan instead.

I know, deep down, that the only way to affect the regime change that we desperately need is to continue these protests. To tell them how we feel and have the world hear our side of the story. But I fear that the Catch-22 here is that doing so will be terminal to our hopes of staying up.

The team are bereft of ideas and confidence and that brief flirtation with solidity under Moyes has long since departed. In the last week, our goal difference has taken an even bigger battering than David Sullivan's ego. The protest is entirely necessary for us, because without it we will never get the better team we need to avoid being in these relegation scraps all the time, but it is distracting for the players and may contribute to sending us down. Pick the bones out of that, Yossarian.

We need three wins from somewhere and you'd say that if they aren't taken from Southampton, Stoke and Everton then we won't be long for this world. In effect, I'm asking an unruly mob to strike a balance between protest and lung bursting support. I think I might be being a touch optimistic.

***

"I am now a central part of your mind's landscape, 

Whether you care or do not"

- Morrissey, "The More You Ignore Me, The Closer I Get"

But this is where we are now. Without those protests on Saturday, would the full wattage of the media currently be shining with such force on our corner of the footballing world? Probably not. We have seen Miguel Delaney, Jacob Steinberg, Sam Wallace, Ken Early and John Dillon scratch the surface of our situation and find interesting stuff beneath their fingernails. With protests planned before the Southampton game, the best option open to the club now would probably be to allow them to proceed in the hope that supporters can exorcise their revolutionary spirit in the morning and concentrate on the match in the afternoon.

Which brings me back to the owners. I have wavered on their continuing stewardship because I fear the path taken by Coventry, Blackpool, Blackburn, Aston Villa and so many other former contemporaries. I have previously written that a bad manager can set a club back years, while bad owners can hamstring you for a generation. But the moment these guys chose not to intervene when they knew their own supporters were being threatened was the moment I wanted them gone. I'll take my chances in the lawless bandit country that is football ownership, if it means that we can go to games without worrying about our own safety.

But leaving that aside for the moment, for such a departure is not imminent, the crucial thing for them to decide now is whether they are in this as fans or businessmen. They currently flit between the two, alienating everyone as they go. I have no objection to owners who lend the club money at high interest rates, but then they don't get to turn around and claim that they are exempt from fan protest because they are "custodians" and not owners, and they damn well ought to be competent enough on an individual level to know exactly what role they are performing for the club. As it is, Sullivan denied being Director of Football in December, sandwiched in between two sets of accounts that explicitly identified him as performing that role. That is not indicative of good corporate governance.

They did well to get that in

And how grimly I laughed as Sullivan bemoaned the failure of the minimum wage stewards to put themselves between him and an angry mob, considering that he couldn't have cared less when they did the exact thing same last season but it was our kids who were bearing the brunt of it all. I say again - they fail because there is no human face to the club, and apparently not even a scintilla of empathy around that boardroom table. I found it telling that Sir Trevor Brooking stayed in his seat and faced down the mob on Saturday, while others disappeared to the safety of the hospitality suites. A rare glimpse of dignity amidst the turmoil.

I hope we don't go down, because the repercussions of that go far beyond the boardroom and the playing staff. The wider club is diminished and the clock is once agin reset to "rebuilding", a mindset that has felt like our default for nearly two decades now. We operate in the face of a permanent storm front. We are reducing to being a walking "hold my beer" meme. These people have inflicted great damage upon the name of our club.

Forget those media critics who helicopter in for a quick look around the Director's Box and then leave, baffled at the level of anger among fans. I follow the Danny Baker code over people like Jim White and Jason Burt - ask yourself when the last time was that they ever paid to go to a game and if it wasn't any time recently then you can discount their opinion. Proper journalists are examining our club and finding what we have long known to be true; that there is a deep malaise afflicting the soul of West Ham. And whether we like it or not, it's very possible that the spark that reignited the fire in our belly was the sight of those fans confronting our owners. It may be jagged and edgy and hard and rough but in many ways, that is West Ham.

I don't know where we go from here, but I do know that there is no going back.

Swansea 4 - 1 West Ham (And Other Ramblings)

"Sometimes I fantasise, when the streets are cold and lonely 

And the cars they burn below me"

- The Stone Roses, "Made of Stone"

I've spent the last two days in my loft. Shuffling boxes to my garden shed in preparation for a loft conversion, morosely staring into the gloom and pondering a great many things. Predominant amongst them is a question that boomerangs around my consciousness. What, I ask aloud, has happened to my club?

Early entry for that new club crest

I ponder my youth and the first time my dad took me to a game at Upton Park in 1986. Ipswich under the lights. An electric dreamland. We went behind and I nearly started crying. We came back to win and I think I did start crying. We were going to win the league and my football supporting life was going to be spent in the Elysian fields, watching a style of play from another world. You can keep your archangels, for I have seen Alan Devonshire. I pitied my school friends who supported Arsenal. What did they know of life or love? I had seen Valhalla and it was claret and blue. Plus Geoff Pike was there, oddly.

My cousin was with me that night, and now we sit next to each other each week with our own children. A gift passed through the ages from generation to generation, repeated everywhere through the stadium. I often think the gift that football gives us is not the game itself, but the time we get to spend with our loved ones. Our children's experiences don't yet match ours, but they have the great gift of youthful optimism to tide them over. They think their day will come and who am I to deny them such a dream.

I urge you to find your own similar place of quiet repose. If, like me, you had the stuffing knocked out of you this weekend, then it will help you. At a time when our club seems so devoid of an identity and so bereft of hope, I found it helpful to look inward. For you it might be Trevor Brooking or Pop Robson or perhaps Bobby Moore if you're truly lucky. Those names are echoes in the wind to someone of my age. I settled instead on Ian Bishop, Trevor Sinclair and Scott Parker - each of them a marker on my emotional journey supporting West Ham.

All of this, you might think, is a bit melodramatic for a 4-1 loss at Swansea, especially considering that this result was literally not even the worst 4-1 defeat we have suffered at the hands of Swansea in the last three seasons.

But that's not the cause of my malaise. I'm down here in the gutter because I feel like I lost something this weekend. I can take your 4-1 defeat and raise you a 6-0 FA Cup slaughter at Old Trafford, a 3-0 disaster at Notts County that sparked the first sit down anti Board protest, or even a 9-0 aggregate League Cup semi final defeat to Manchester City where I think I saw a football team declare for the first time ever. We all knew the drill when we signed up - if you wanted to win every week, go somewhere else. But this was something different. Something much deeper.

***

"See the lonely boy, out on the weekend, trying to make it pay

Can't relate to joy, he tries to speak, and can't begin to say"

- Neil Young, "Out on the Weekend"

So even as Winston Reid threw himself at a Swansea attack like a walrus falling off a glacier and knocked himself unconscious, and the home side swept into a two nil lead before our makeshift backline had even woken up, nobody was really batting an eyelid. It turns out that David Moyes has achieved the exact same results as Slaven Bilic in their last eighteen matches in charge. Plus ca change, perhaps.

I think that's probably a bit unfair as Moyes has had tougher fixtures, and didn't get the benefit of that soft looking start that Bilic wasted, but it's undeniable that any gains are being measured in inches and not in miles. I think we look better organised, fitter and more structured under the Scot, but here we are, deep in a relegation battle with a squad that isn't remotely fit for the task. Like I said, now might be a good time to close your eyes and think of Metz.

After the Reid injury, Moyes probably should have found a way to get Antonio on to the pitch given our very obvious lack of pace, but instead brought on Sam Byram and shifted Zabaleta infield, and somehow now we were playing five defenders and the only one who was a natural central half isn't old enough to drink on the end of season beano to Vegas. West Ham, baby - next level. 

I used to be quite enamoured of Swansea, as I felt that they were at least a side with a distinctive pattern of play that made them entertaining for neutrals. Now, rather like us, they are in that indistinguishable pot of lower half teams who look alright when they win and very Mrs Brown's Boys when they lose. Here, they battered us by pressing with energy and drive and taking their chances, which mostly arose as a result of comedic West Ham defending. They are in the ascendancy while we are hurtling down like a lead lined corpse in a river.

After a rousing half time team talk from Moyes, the team emerged as if in that upside down dream sequence from Inception, and immediately conceded a third when Adrian palmed a corner directly into Javier Hernandez's face, and watched as it dropped perfectly for Andy King to score against us. That was King's fifth goal in seven games against us. Imagine Andy King being your nemesis. Close your eyes. Payet. Old Trafford. Breathe.

That half time team talk

After that, everyone went to sleep and Cheik Kouyate fouled Andre Ayew to concede a penalty, before Antonio popped up with a late consolation. Prior to this, Marko Arnautovic should have opened our account when put through by Manuel Lanzini but took far too long and eventually dithered for so long that even Theresa May started mocking him. I wonder if Jordan Hugill should be introduced? What of £39 million pound man and European Champion, Joao Mario? And then I wonder if the passengers on the Titanic thought umbrellas would save them.

And thus the team wandered off, humiliated and having repaid absolutely nothing of the efforts shown by the travelling fans to make the trip through the springtime snow. I think we'll escape relegation because I think Moyes has the nous to navigate his way through the icebergs, but then again I once thought Paul Jewell would make a good West Ham manager. You can't trust me.

As you left Wales, I hope some of you were able to gaze fondly towards Cardiff and dream a little dream of Bobby Zamora in the hazy sunlight of a Play Off final. You deserved it.

***

"Outside, I'm masquerading

Inside, my hope is fading"

- Smokey Robinson and The Miracles, "Tracks of My Tears"

But as I sit here now, writing and rewriting this piece, I can't shake the nagging feeling that is eating away at me. What happened on the pitch on Saturday was shambolic, but it was just football.

What happened off the pitch disturbed me far more.

Most of you will be aware that a variety of fans groups had banded together under the moniker of West Ham Groups United with a view to engaging the club on a variety of points. The lead focus of this was the Real West Ham Fans (RWHF), an organisation put together at staggeringly short notice just before Christmas, with a large Facebook following and an ability to organise numbers in a way that I don't recall seeing before at West Ham. The lead men were former ICF faces, but were at pains to distance themselves from that era.

Other groups joined them - KUMB, WHUISA, Hammers Chat among them - and before long they had an audience with Karren Brady. I thought the demands that were made of the club were curiously low level, but accepted that a stratagem of starting slowly and building was more likely to succeed than simply demanding the owners sell up.

Before long, that wasn't moving swiftly enough and RWHF announced a march. Again, I thought that was strange as it seemed to be an over the top response, but again indicative of the pressure cooker atmosphere among fans, as the team stumbled along with a typically enormous injury list and an even more typically useless January transfer window.

So, with me being in the very small minority who didn't fancy a march, huge numbers were mobilised for a protest on 10th March. Whatever I might have thought of the tactics I couldn't argue with the effectiveness of it all. Kids, women, disabled fans and all comers were welcome. I might not have been flying the plane, but it didn't mean I wasn't keen on the destination.

And then, talks proceeded and suddenly, RWHF cancelled the march. Leaving aside what impact that might have on future attempts to galvanise West Ham fans into public action, it left a gaping hole. Fans wanted to march, and the concessions seemingly drawn from Karren Brady didn't seem to amount to much more than asking the landlord we routinely sue to uphold his agreement with us for a few favours. It was, in short, baffling.

Now, I wasn't in the meetings and have only read the same notes as all of you. Who knows what really happened but one point to note is that the Club will be making a contribution to the fund for cancer patient, Isla Caton, a cause dear to the West Ham heart and something that surely transcends club badges and retractable seating and half time beer queues. Before you quibble about that, and the ethical element of the club making that offer is highly fucking questionable, it's probably worth asking how easy it would be to look her family in the eye and tell them you turned down that money.

But that doesn't excuse what happened next.

Fans still wanted to march, and as the group with the best links to the council, Football Supporters Federation and the Police, WHUISA stepped into the breach. The feeling was that the march would still happen, with the RWHF group stepping aside to pursue their apparent links to the Board, and others putting forth their objections on the streets.

And then, on Saturday night the RWHF Facebook page went fully hallucinogenic. It was announced that the group was now under the control of the ICF, and that anybody marching would be met with violence. Suddenly, the march was apparently under the control of Antifa activists and would now be political in nature, and would thus be forcibly stopped from entering Stratford. This was news to the thousands of West Ham fans still planning to march, but in this instance the lie was twice around the world before the truth even knew there was a race to be run.

Leaving aside for a moment the concept of Antifa being used in a pejorative sense, the entire episode was odd because it amounted to the organisers of a march threatening anyone who then wanted to go on it. Eventually, today, it was cancelled on the grounds of safety. Go find your happy place. Brooking. Wembley. A white Admiral kit.

More sinisterly, the chair of WHUISA, a guy called Mark Walker, was being described as a political activist with links to Sadiq Khan. The evidence for this seems to have amounted to Walker once working for the Labour Party and having the temerity to vote for Khan in the Mayoral election.

Unable to process any of what was happening, and finding myself distressed like the liberal snowflake I am by the sight of West Ham fans being threatened by West Ham fans, I decided to ask around. First up I messaged Walker and asked about the notion that he was a lefty activist. He explained that after the meetings with Brady he had taken her public comments and fact checked them with the landlord. I'm pretty sure that sounds like the kind of thing an Independent Supporters Association is supposed to do. When you're in a negotiation you don't take the word of the other party at face value. You robustly check it. Other people have told me that Brady isn't especially happy that WHUISA have been doing this. Good.

I also asked Walker how he was. He replied that he had been physically threatened and wasn't sleeping. An away season ticket holder, he doesn't think he'll ever attend another game. Just process that for a moment.

I understand the allure of the RWHF group and I can see the progress they have made. But this is reprehensible. I can't in good conscience support it and I don't know how anyone else can. If our fan representatives are just going to threaten us when public opinion moves in a different direction to their own then I struggle to see how that is representation. I was told I could take my daughters on that march, and then suddenly we were at risk if we were marching with WHUISA. Well, I would have been under their banner, and that is terrifying. And suddenly that thought boomerangs back again, and no FA Cup win over Everton or three goal Wembley comeback at Spurs can shake it from my mind. What has happened to my club?

When you next make that little list of West Ham heroes, you should probably add Mark Walker to it.

***

"Shake your fist at him, tell him it's alright

Say it's alright"

- The Flying Burrito Brothers, "Down in the Churchyard"

As a kid, one of the single most thrilling sporting events I can remember watching was the World Athletics 4x400m relay in Tokyo.

Watch this. You will stand a little taller in your shoes (if you're British).

But what was especially thrilling to the twelve year old me, was that the hero of the British team - Kriss Akabussi - was a West Ham fan. And there it was. That indelible connection. An invisible rope between us. That feeling that if ever we were to meet I would be able to look at him and he at me and we would have a shared bond that only a few could understand. And in the end, isn't that what football is supposed to give you? An entrance to an exclusive club that only the privileged few get to see? When I say Oldham, Valentines Day - you all know what that means. It's a link forged without us even knowing.

I think of the friends that West Ham and this blog have made for me. The Princeton graduate, the soldiers, the writers, the taxi drivers, the comedians, the accountants, the ones who have jobs with consultant in them that I don't really understand. And above it all. Claret and blue. West Ham.

I've never met Mark Walker and yet when I hear about a West Ham fan being threatened by others it runs completely contrary to all of that. It doesn't just break a code, it smashes it. I was never in thrall to the ICF as a kid because I was too young for it, but I understand why others are. There is a mythology to that time, and when there seems to be so little of our club left, I get why people look backwards. Hell, I suggested it myself at the top of this article.

But this can't happen. Marches can't be cancelled because of threats of violence. I once climbed a huge hill in the Marlborough Sounds in New Zealand and got to the top to find the only other human being within a five mile radius was a West Ham fan from Manor Park. I don't want to have to wonder if he is with "us" or "them". I just want to nod and say "Joey Beauchamp, eh?" and leave it at that.

I doubt that the Tory commentator Iain Dale and I will ever agree on anything politically but I respect his love for the club, respect his opinions and would be proud to stand next to him at a game. His politics don't matter to me, and I doubt mine do to him, when we're both stood at the ground wondering exactly how Liverpool managed to score from our corner.

I want West Ham to be the most inclusive club in the country. I want to see more women in the ground, more ethnic minorities to better reflect our natural catchment area, I want to be the most welcoming place for those in the LGBT community and above all a safe place to watch football for anyone. And I don't give a shit if that makes me that liberal snowflake again.

As someone who supported the move I've done a lot of soul searching over the last couple of months and I can't help but feel that I failed West Ham by not doing a better job of interrogating the specifics of the new stadium. Not that my opinion carries any weight but more in the sense that each of us should now be asking ourselves that question. I still believe that moving could and should have been the springboard to a new era but it is becoming increasingly clear that moving under these owners and to this stadium has damaged the club, possibly irrevocably.

As I look down at the club crest on my shirt I keep returning to a single thought - "I didn't do enough". It's not a great feeling to say out loud that you have failed, but there is no doubt that I have. I certainly failed to heed those who didn't want to move. I believed them to be dinosaurs unable to see obvious progress when it stared them in the face. To you, I apologise.

I believed the hype, believed that modernity and progress were more important than tradition, and could not possibly be mismanaged, and for that we have paid the highest possible price. While West Ham is run as it currently is, the soulless husk of a football club that is currently traipsing around the country will be our weekly reminder of that solipsism. I can't speak for any of you, but I should have done better by this football club I have loved my entire life.

And that is the great danger of all this. Something changed for me on Saturday. I'm not sure I will ever view my club in the same way again. The owners might be delighted that the march is off, and the divide and conquer approach has worked, but there is a cost to all of these things. While they remain, I will view West Ham like a lost love. After all, this isn't the club I fell for all those years ago.

I'm devastated tonight.

Julian Dicks. Forest away. The free kick into the top corner. Pandemonium.

What the hell has happened to my club?

***

Oh yeah, and if you agree with any of that, then you too should join WHUISA today. Sometimes it's not enough to just nod your head and murmur agreement. They need your numbers so that they can keep holding the club to account. Help them.