And Into The Fire

"Out of the blue and into the black

They give you this, but you pay for that"

- Neil Young, "My My, Hey Hey (Out of the Blue)

Well, that didn't last long.

When last you were here, we were basking in the warm glow of a nascent unbeaten run and an emphatic thumping of Manchester United. Since then we've lost to Brighton and Spurs, found ourselves in the middle of a national discussion around employment rights and freedom of speech and a new signing has picked up a season ending injury because traditions must be upheld, goddamnit.

I'll see you soon - save me a bed on the ward

Brighton 1 - 0 West Ham 

Our trip to Brighton could almost have been directed by Guy Ritchie, so predictable was the outcome, as we followed up a rousing victory over Mourinho by going very quietly into the night. Such swings of form and fortune are the hallmark of supporting a lower half team, but it's still a thudding punch when it happens.

The most frustrating element of this game was that we had so much of the play. After a fairly non descript opening, our defence went full Moses and the Red Sea as Beram Kayal set up Glen Murray in the 25th minute. This marked the sixth time Murray has scored against us which officially means that he is now a Nemesis, which rather reminds me of the moment you find out that the bad guy in Lord of the Rings is an upset lighthouse keeper.

And Glen Murray did appear

Thereafter we pressed and harried for an hour, and ended up fielding a thoroughly playground 4-1-5 formation as Manuel Pellegrini asked the outstanding Declan Rice to do everyone's defending and shovelled attackers on ahead of him. For all that, our best chance fell to Fabian Balbuena who headed inexplicably wide, unmarked from a Felipe Anderson corner. This upset the Brazilian so much that he has apparently refused to ever take a decent corner again.

Marko Arnautovic also had some presentable chances, including a last minute opportunity created by Robert Snodgrass and Lucas Perez that he skied over the bar. In such moments it's possible to see why he plays for us and not for a bigger club. That inconsistency probably says a lot less about him than it does about the remarkable continued excellence displayed by the likes of Kane and Aguero.

And thus we left the South Coast with a curious mixture of feelings. In isolation it was hard to criticise the performance given that we had dominated the ball and had the better chances, but there remains an itch that can't be scratched about defeats such as these. It's not that I think we ought to always beat teams such as Brighton - we have, after all, not ever actually done so in the Premier League - but more a sense that such erratic failure remains hard coded into our DNA.

We did enough here to win, would have grumbled but accepted a point and yet somehow went home with our pockets empty. Plus ca change. Perhaps one ought to acknowledge the difficulty of getting a team up and running in just eight games. Pellegrini has endured a difficult start after all, with no team in the league having a tougher opening nine games than us, but I'm still waiting to see something click into gear, a penny drop or a corner turned. We remain a footballing roulette wheel.

***

"No I do not feel that good

When I see the heartbreaks you embrace"

- Bob Dylan, "Positively 4th Street"

And so to Spurs. It doesn't make much sense, but in recent years this has been a fixture to rejuvenate us from cold spells. Whether it was Ravel Morrison crowning Sam Allardyce's tactical masterclass at White Hart Lane (and convincing Big Sam to play unsuccessfully without a striker for two more months), the highlight of Andre Ayew's Hammers career at Wembley, or the Friday night title charge ending winner from Lanzini, we have done well against Spurs of late. Indeed, going into this game we had actually won this fixture more times than them in the preceding eight years, despite that being arguably the best period of their modern history.

It was a shame then to see us fritter that away with a subdued performance of questionable intent. Andriy Yarmolenko started diffidently and ended up being stretchered off with an Achilles tear. His season is over, and the wisdom of David Sullivan's long held policy of buying players who are either old or have poor injury records continues to look like a folly. A reminder too that the glibly promised new scouting and analytics department has yet to be seen. Perhaps it's part of a package deal with the London Stadium WiFi.

Anyway, Yarmolenko joins Carlos Sanchez, Jack Wilshere, Winston Reid and Lanzini on the Andy Carroll Memorial wing, and we are now just a couple of weeks away from the Pellegrini rite of passage press conference where he tells us he's never seen an injury crisis like it.

I have no sympathy - when you buy with no regard to player fitness being a skill and don't invest in training or medical facilities then this is what happens. Topping the injury charts stops being unfortunate when it happens every single year. So off went Yarmolenko and on came Grady Diangana, which tells us quite a bit about how well Michail Antonio must be doing in training.

We were also missing Pedro Obiang, which was a shame as central midfield has long been the weak link in the Spurs chain. With the Spaniard missing, Harry Winks was the best player on the pitch in the first half, which was even more impressive as he was playing alongside Easter Island statue Eric Dier and "bring your best mate to work day" winner Moussa Sissoko. In the second half that accolade belonged to Declan Rice, in supreme form again, and it wasn't hard to see that we might be witnessing an England midfield pairing of the near future there.

I thought Spurs were the better side in the first half as they pushed Kieran Trippier way up the pitch to take advantage of our defensively weak left side, and used some clever movement from Erik Lamela and Lucas Moura to trouble our back four. We held firm as the visitors nice play rarely resulted in attempts on goal - they mustered just two all day - until Sissoko took advantage of Anderson and crossed for Lamela to flick in a header. They could have scored again soon after but for a marvellous save from Lukasz Fabianski, and at half time I wasn't all that confident.

We looked especially vulnerable from our own corners as Anderson was taking them with all the skill of a man whose eyes were sewn shut, and our two deepest lying defenders were Pablo Zabaleta and Mark Noble which is akin to leaving two guys in a canoe to keep out a submarine. We survived, although I refuse to accept this as evidence that this plan is a good idea.

No problem lads, Zaba and Nobes are there

The second half was much better, as we pushed higher and played all the game in the Spurs half. In the end, we failed to get anything largely due to the excellence of Hugo Lloris who made four fine stops. Tactically I still struggle to see exactly what Pellegrini is attempting to achieve, although he wasn't helped here by the performance of Anderson, who was resolutely dreadful until he was mercifully hooked off. Worryingly, our best performances this season have come when we've been able to counter attack against stronger teams and thus we have been heavily reliant upon the trio of Yarmolenko, Arnautovic, and Anderson. The first is done for the season, the second is operating on one knee and the last made me pine for Sofiane Feghouli here. With softer fixtures finally around the corner, Pellegrini is going to need to find a way for us to play on the front foot. 

It would also be remiss of me if I were not mention the outstanding performance of our centre halves, Balbuena and Issa Diop. While they probably get altogether too many opportunities to demonstrate their excellence, it has been reassuring to see them settling into something approaching a solid partnership. Coming into this season it seemed impossible for us not to play with three at the back simply due to the limitations of our personnel, but Diop alone has been so good that those fears have faded away. With the brilliant Fabianski behind them there is cause for optimism as we face weaker opposition, even if our general approach to full backs seems to be to pick two people at random and then reach for the rosary beads. 

Midfield remains our main area of concern, primarily because most of them are injured. A central trio of Noble, Obiang and Rice offers a nice balance, but we finished this game with a four of Diangana, Rice, Snodgrass and Antonio and a sudden surge of affection for Cheikhou Kouyate. It is slightly disconcerting that if Rice were to suffer an injury, it feels like it would curtail the entire season. Perhaps we ought to stop leaking details of his contract demands to friendly websites and instead concentrate on actually advancing his career.

***

"Get out your mat and pray to the West

I'll get out mine and pray for myself" - 

The Jam, "Eton Rifles"

But matters on the pitch are only ever the hors d'oeuvres when you're dining at Chez Titanic.

And so perhaps the most controversial element of the last month has revolved around our Under 18 youth team coach, Mark Phillips, who sprang into the public consciousness after writing a number of tweets where he stated that he had attended a march by the Democratic Football Lads Alliance (DFLA) in London, and explicitly praising West Ham fans for being the largest segment of the marchers. For those of you unfamiliar with the DFLA, they are a self styled anti-extremism group who splintered from the Football Lads Alliance (FLA), who were themselves an offshoot from the English Defence League (EDL), and I'm now wondering if their main plan for defeating extremism is through the medium of acronyms. Phillips was suspended by West Ham, and our fan base was cleaved down the middle by the issue. 

The DFLA pronounce themselves to be a non-political, anti extremist group and they appear to have garnered a lot of support from West Ham fans. From the state of my timeline on Twitter after this story broke, I would hazard a guess that some H List readers were on the march and in that sense I feel duty bound to examine the organisation properly. Members are adamant that the group opposes all forms of terrorism as well as holding other disparate positions such as demanding better treatment for military veterans, objecting to paedophile grooming gangs and wanting action on "missing" immigrants. Noted right wing agitator Stephen Yaxley-Lennon has also previously attended a march under his more commonly used moniker, Tommy Robinson.

Flowers for Al-Jazeera

Quite what any of this has to do with football is beyond me, and while the marchers may feel their stance is apolitical, a letter was handed in at Downing Street by the organisers demanding changes to government policy, which seems to me to render that argument redundant. Thus people carrying our club crest on this march are making a political affiliation of their cause to West Ham whether they accept it or not.

But one also has to acknowledge that the march was legally organised, did not contravene hate speech laws and thus was lawful. Therefore, the question of whether Mark Phillips was within his rights to legally attend seems clear to me - he was.

But freedom of speech and thought and expression are not the same thing as freedom from consequence. Glen Hoddle was within his rights to say that he thought disabled people were being punished for sins of a former life, and the FA were within their rights to decide that was unacceptable and fire him. Thus, Phillips was perfectly at liberty to attend this march, and tweet in support of it - his sister was caught up in the London Bridge terror attacks - but one also has to acknowledge that the DFLA have been described as Far Right by the Police, Anti Fascist groups and the Premier League and appear on several watch lists due to anti Islamic posts on their Facebook page.

It probably didn't help Phillips that his Twitter timeline was later examined and it was found that he had liked a post from Katie Hopkins suggesting that Viktor Orban would "defend Christian culture in Europe", and another comparing Jeremy Corbyn to Hitler. Friends say he is a great guy and a good coach, but people who don't know him have no personal interactions to go on and can only therefore judge him on his actions. It isn't surprising that people have concerns.

While several members dispute that the DFLA position is Islamaphobic, I would suggest checking your back door for Labradors if you read their site because there is an awful lot of dog whistling going on. And this, I think, is the key point that seems to be missed by so many in this debate, and it's something I have said about West Ham previously;

You don't get to tell other people how they feel. 

So yes, Phillips was entitled to attend the march, and others are just as entitled to decide that the intent of that march was Islamaphobic. That same freedom of speech that protects him also protects them.

And if Muslim Hammers supporters say that this is an issue, and that they would be less likely to take their child to our Academy, or even to games, then DFLA members don't get to tell them they are wrong. That's just not how society works, and anyone truly believing in free speech wouldn't pretend otherwise.

And no doubt there are some who feel that their support of the DFLA has been misrepresented and that they genuinely are just taking a position against terrorism. Well, that's reasonable enough and we all ought to be grown up enough to accept that there is nuance in everything and that no one group of people ever think homogeneously about anything. I, after all, consider myself a Labour supporter but have little time for Jeremy Corbyn or the anti-Semitism that seems to stick to the party like glue. I understand the shades of grey.

But any DFLA member wishing to apply that logic, and wishing to be distinguished from those who marched with them and threw Nazi salutes, might want to ponder the irony of asking not to be judged by the actions of a few individuals - whilst marching against Islamic extremism. If the DFLA wants to get off Far Right watch lists and be seen as the peaceful non political group they wish to portray, then they need to do an awful lot more to disentangle themselves from those who clearly have no issue with those labels.

***

"You do it to yourself, you do

And that's what really hurts"

- Radiohead, "Just"

But back to West Ham. My overriding feeling about Phillips is that I am angry with him for dragging the club into this. It is bad enough that fans choose to march in this way with our club crest so prominent, and claim to represent the rest of us, but for an employee of the club to do it is naive at best. And lest we forget, he has done this just a few months after Tony Henry was fired for referring to African players as causing "mayhem".

But then I find myself asking the same question over and again. What exactly does it say about the culture of our club that these things continue to happen?

For an answer to this I think you first have to understand Sullivanism. How no stone shall ever be overturned, no edge shall be sought, and how others do the leading and we follow on later when it is more expensive. Tomorrow never matters, only today, which is currently a catastrophe because we didn't do what we were supposed to do yesterday. Sullivanism is a lifelong devotion to bailing water out of a sinking ship and never addressing the hole in the boat. This is how you spend more on your squad than all but fifteen other European teams and still end up being worse than Bournemouth.

And what this culture of being substandard does is bleed and seep everywhere. If the training ground isn't up to scratch and the Baroness is encouraging people to watch her new TV show rather than the first team match being broadcast at the same time, then why the hell should anybody else care about the way the club is projected? What exactly does working for West Ham mean, and what exactly does our club stand for? Truthfully, I think what these repeated episodes tell us is that the answer is.....nothing. The club stands for nothing.

And when you have no moral core, no vision, no structure and no plan and you stand for nothing, then this is what happens. People lose sight of the success of the club being meaningful. From the outside it looks to me like there is a huge vacuum where there ought to be leadership. Sullivan is holed up in Theydon Bois on the phone to agents, Brady is part time and Pellegrini disappears back to Chile whenever there is a break in fixtures. Who, I wonder, is there to shape the club and establish the values that employees ought to be adhering to?

That West Ham leadership structure in full

I don't know Mark Phillips, and I have no idea what his past performance or conduct has been like, or the terms of his employment contract, and therefore it would be entirely inappropriate for me to comment on what should happen to him. Very specifically, I have no idea if his views have ever impeded the development of kids from ethnic minorities because until a month ago we had never developed any kids from any background at all.

I will say this though - this sort of thing happens too often for me to think it is a series of random events. Employees are operating with no regard for the club's reputation either because they have no regard for the club's reputation or it has never been made clear to them that they need to be more professional in their conduct. And that comes from the culture within West Ham. It comes from leadership, or more relevantly, the absence of it and it comes from the acceptance that West Ham is not a high performance work environment.

So, when youth coaches feel they can tweet from Far Right marches, and when high profile players go out boozing while injured, and when nepotism is rife, and the Vice Chairman refuses to give up a pointless and unhelpful Sun column lest it detract from her personal brand, then what does that tell us? What do these repeated demonstrations of valueless behaviour really mean?

I think it is clear: the club is rotting from the inside out. Mark Phillips is just a symptom - the disease is elsewhere. 

West Ham 0 - 1 Wolves (And Other Ramblings)

WARNING: This is not going to cheer you up. 

"I resist what I cannot change, and I wanna find what can't be found" 

- The War on Drugs, "Pain"

Friends, Romans, countrymen! I have left you alone for a few weeks and, er, what exactly did you do in my absence?

All was well when I left. We were being encouraged to thank the Board for providing us with the "best transfer window ever", and everybody was wondering whether it was too soon to start exchanging our money into Euros ahead of our inevitable European run next season. I return and this is what I find - the ghost of Jack Wilshere wandering aimlessly round our midfield. 

The pain of carrying this team since January

I kind of wondered if it might make sense to watch the new signings play before we declared the summer a success, but July is the time of endless possibilities and the realm of the dreamer. I suppose if you can't get excited then, you never will. And I'm prepared to accept I never will. 

But here is a thing that I have been thinking a lot about this summer. David Sullivan promised us the following back in February, when he was rocking on his heels and the waves of fan protests were lapping at his feet:

"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"

Remember that? Because I do, and I'm never going to let anyone forget it. 

Where am I going with this? Well, as far as I can tell, none of that has been implemented. And so while fans were placated with the amount of money being spent, nobody apparently stopped to question how it was being spent. And this is my main problem with the activities of this summer, namely that the idea of spending £100m is great, but if you spend it in the same way that you wasted the previous £50m then all you're doing is pissing our money up the wall.

And let us be clear - this is our money. David Sullivan isn't spending his own money, he is spending the television money received by West Ham, which he chose not to spend in previous windows. And he charges substantial interest on the money he lends to the club so I think we can strike altruism off the CV. 

So how many times do we reckon that Manuel Pellegrini went to watch Ryan Fredericks then? Because Pellegrini was in China and Fredericks was in the Championship, and I'm struggling to think that it was as many as five or six. With Pellegrini being unveiled on 22nd May and Fredericks being signed on 5th June it doesn't seem to leave a lot of time to get a complex deal like this done. Indeed, Fredericks himself has admitted the discussions around his move were ongoing for a long time before he moved, which leaves us with one of two scenarios:

a) David Sullivan, who was let down by Rafa Benitez hours before his unveiling, was negotiating with players on the say so of a manager he had yet to employ, or;

b) David Sullivan was negotiating with players that he intended to buy irrespective of who the manager was going to be. 

I WONDER WHICH ONE IT COULD POSSIBLY BE?

It is the leadership style du jour, of course. If you present thunder and lightning as par for the course, then people will invariably be happy on the days when it simply rains. But we should put our hands behind our backs and not so readily break out into applause for these guys. Ignore their useful idiots who plague social media with this bizarrely passive approach to requesting anything concrete from the board, and demand a bit more. They don't get to tell us they've been a success before they've actually achieved anything. The best transfer window ever, and there is a very reasonable chance we will now lose our opening seven games? And we're supposed to be thankful to the Board for their work? Do me a favour. 

Look, I know that the story goes that we tied the Pellegrini deal up in January, and he watched all of our games last season but I'm just going to tell you here and now that I don't think Sullivan is, in any way at all, stepping back from transfers. He just isn't. The video analysis team doesn't exist, the new scouting system is a fiction, we still use agents as a primary part of our recruitment function, and the Director of Football was hired by the fucking manager which is the wrong way round, and has a job description on the official website that literally led me to wonder what he does. 

And so we get South Americans, a keeper we don't really need, an injury prone former star who was good in 2012 and is in decline, a soon-to-be 29 year old bought at the height of his value with zero chance he can be sold at a profit, and a load of deals brokered by Unique Sports Management. This Director of Football sure seems to think a lot like the last one. 

But sitting in the Thunderdome on Saturday and watching the crushingly inevitable conclusion to this game, I couldn't help but notice something. 

The scapegoats are gone. 

There is no more Bilic, no Moyes, no Noble, no Adrian, no Zabaleta, no Tony Henry, and it has made absolutely no difference. There is only one constant that I can think of who has remained immovable for the duration of the last few years of torture. 

Yes David - I mean you

Maybe you feel sorry for him because every decision he makes turns out to be wrong. Maybe you think the players and the manager ought to be bearing the brunt of this rant given that they are the ones who are currently setting fire to their own feet. Maybe you think this particular record needs to be changed. 

Well, maybe. But here's the thing:

When all your decisions turn out wrong - stop making them and get someone more qualified to do it. When you hire the manager and buy the players and they consistently aren't very good - stop hiring the managers and stop buying the players, and get someone more qualified to do it.

And changing the record would be to let the Board off scot free. A friend said something to me this weekend and I agree with him. His thought is that Sullivan will ruin this club and we will have to rise again. And he is right. It doesn't matter how much money is spent while we are trapped in this cycle of spiralling incompetence. This is only heading one way, and while I have resigned myself to the fact we can't achieve anything while Sullivan is here, it is terrifying to think of West Ham in that stadium, in the lower leagues, with these owners. 

And so we buy South Americans because they were the best players when David Sullivan formed all his opinions about football. We continue to present this image of the manager being omnipotent at the club because that was the model when David Sullivan formed all his opinions about football. And we continue to be caught and passed by smaller clubs with less money and fewer resources because they have more qualified, more intelligent people making the decisions that matter. And eventually the larger, better financed clubs will catch on as well, and that will be a dark day for us because then our extra commercial revenue won't save us. 

I promise you that I thought all of this before I went on holiday. I had a entire season preview drafted which I was going to post on the day of the Liverpool game but then I had no WiFi when I got to the Dordogne, and I was fairly glad of that fact as I followed along on the radio. By the time I got back we had lost three in a row and it just felt very much like posting it would have been me being wise after the event. I can say now that my feeling was that a top ten finish would have been a remarkable achievement for Pellegrini, and I have already adjusted that to simply staying up. 

Another year of treading water then. Another year of fixing our gaze on the stars and dreaming on a spaceship. Another year of fucking mediocrity while our owner plays Fantasy Football with our very real football club. 

It is September. 

***

"Get out your white suit, your tap shoes and tails

Let's go backward when forward fails"

- Peter Allen, "Everything Old is New Again"

This was my first chance to see the new version of West Ham and to be honest, the main question it raised in my mind was whether anyone had bothered to check whether the reason Pellegrini looks so craggy is because he is really Slaven Bilic wearing an ill fitting Mission Impossible mask?

In fact, this was an absolutely Bilician event from start to finish. The three defeats preceding it adding a frisson of tension to the air before a ball was kicked, the near total lack of an attacking plan, players strolling around as if convalescing, and the strangely inevitable feeling that it was bound to end 1-0. All Pellegrini needed to do was bend over and grab his knees and I swear we could have gone back in time. Sadly, the idea of playing like a Bilic team without either Dimitri Payet or Manuel Lanzini isn't very sustainable and we duly coughed up the late goal we had deserved to concede all day. All of which was made worse by the fact that Wolves comfortably outplayed us without actually playing especially well. 

The 11tegen11 Expected Goals map highlights nicely the dominance of the visitors, and if their centre forward Raul Jimenez wasn't playing in some kind of dream like state we'd have been well beaten long before Carlos Sanchez lost all cortical function and let Joao Moutinho rob him in our half as Adama Traore sprinted past a superbly half arsed Aaron Cresswell to slot in the winner. Traore is a kind of mythical figure among football analysts as he is almost without equal in European dribbling stats but is totally unable to produce any kind of end product. West Ham - still good for what ails you. 

The entire day was a disappointment as almost every aspect of the team looked confused. Pellegrini still claims to be unsure of his best team - despite watching all our games from last season and buying all his own players apparently - and that is cripplingly obvious on the field. 

I actually thought the back four didn't look too terrible, as Issa Diop was very good, and crucially demonstrated the kind of recovery speed that might allow a team to play such a high defensive line as we are apparently going to do. Diop and Fredericks are actually the two signings I like most from the summer, despite being the two who were first in the door, meaning they were most likely Sullivan signings. Both are mobile, and young enough to develop and improve. That said, Fredericks was pretty poor here and didn't utilise his outstanding pace particularly well when going forward. 

He wasn't helped by the dire performance of Michail Antonio in front of him, who was so bad that I am beginning to wonder if someone has inserted two bowling balls into his knees. We had a strangely fluid attacking line up of Anderson, Snodgrass and Antonio who switched positions a lot and as a result spread their uselessness all over the field nicely. Snodgrass was sacrificed at half time - not literally, although the way things are going we shouldn't immediately rule it out - for Yarmolenko who came on and immediately looked exhausted. I'm beginning to long for the days of that 96 year old fitness coach that Bilic used to have. 

After Anderson was pretty effective last week at Arsenal in a central role, he was shunted out to the left where he summarily failed to do anything. Ahead of him Marko Arnautovic had our only real chance very late on, when he got free in the inside right channel and only an excellent, but fortuitous, save from Rui Patricio denied us a thoroughly undeserved win. 

***

"Oh but I can hear you, loud in the centre

Aren't we made to be crowded together, like leaves?"

- Fleet Foxes, "Third of May/Odaigahara"

Perhaps the biggest problem, however, is the same one we have had for three years. We have nothing in central midfield. 

Wilshere's ghost was nominally in there for the first hour but he has neither the mobility nor the defensive attitude to play in such a role. I would never have signed Wilshere simply because of his injury record, but there looks to me to be a real risk that the cumulative injuries have caused quite a dramatic physical decline. It's early and maybe he's still searching for fitness - no rush, lads, it's only September - but I've been shocked at how limited he has looked. He looks like a number ten or nothing, at this point. And we already have about twenty seven ineffective ones. 

Alongside him Sanchez was passable, but is similarly limited, meaning that in the most crucial area of the pitch we are likely to be inferior to every team we meet. And it should be pointed out that this was a new central midfield, so this was actually the attempt to fix this situation. Jack Wilshere and Carlos Sanchez. Where the fuck was Pellegrini watching our games - in an opium den?

Should I not have given it away there?

Things improved marginally when Pedro Obiang came on, as he came actually defend and attack and run and respirate, but we are woefully short in that area. We sold Cheikhou Kouyate for £9.5m to Crystal Palace - which is a mere £3m less than Liverpool got from Leicester for their third choice goalkeeper - meaning we simply have no mobility in the middle of the park. For a manager who wants to pay a variation on 4-4-2, it boggles the mind that he can be happy with the options he has available. 

At the heart of the problem is the mismarriage of tactics and personnel. Fans are obsessed with high pressing these days, but that isn't feasible for us because we don't buy any attacking players with the ability to do it. So Javier Hernandez comes on to great cheers, and then floats around the pitch as if determined to prove the Hare and the Tortoise is a relatable story. He was hardly alone though as we put no pressure on the ball anywhere, and our failure to do so was so uniform that it actually seemed possible that this was by design. But if that was the case then one would have expected to us to have dropped much deeper and invited Wolves on to smother them with a low block. We didn't do that either. 

So, I don't really think Pellegrini is implementing a high press. I see no evidence of that in our play, but instead I see fairly rigid lines which should, in theory invite opponents on and into the teeth of a well organised and compact side. I am guessing that the high line should compress space and allow us to deny space to the opposition, meaning we recover the ball further up the pitch with greater opportunities to attack. But if that is your plan, you need some central midfielders who can harry the opposition, and then launch quick counterattacks. And we don't have any of those. 

I also think you need at least one natural wide midfielder, rather than a winger, but we don't have any of those either. The nearest is Snodgrass, who is always the first sacrificed when the tide turns and seems a bit lost in this systemless system. It is almost as though having two ex Aston Villa players in the heart of the side isn't actually a good thing. 

I just don't really understand any of it really. Is this really the system which Pellegrini wants to play, and if so why didn't we buy players who better suit it? Rome wasn't built in a day, and all that, but it is also fair to say that they had achieved something at the end of that day. We've gone backwards. David Moyes built a small little Etruscan villa and we've knocked it down. This team is less organised, less fit and less coherent than anything put together by Moyes, and while I wouldn't sack Pellegrini even if he loses all the next three games (who are we going to hire - Allardyce?) I still want to see some evidence of progress. 

***

"I'll brace myself for the loneliness

Say hello to feelings that I detest"

- Camera Obscura, "My Maudlin Career"

I hate this. 

I spent my holiday with my head buried in old history books about West Ham, and rediscovering my love for my club. Such affection seeped away last year, like angry fans streaming out of a half empty stadium, and it was enervating to reconnect again. So I fell in love with Graham Paddon and George Foreman and Johny Byrne and spent hours writing about those who I considered West Ham's Fifty Greatest Players. 

And now this. One fucking game and I'm back in mid season form, raging at Sullivan and the dying of the light, and trying desperately to convince myself that there is hope in the chaos. But I think this is a compound effect of near relentless gloom for the last twenty four months. We haven't had a good transfer window for years, and the jury should still be out on this one. It's entirely possible that things will come good, of course, and Pellegrini will bring his undeniable pedigree to bear and straighten it all out but that still wouldn't lift my mood all that much. I have now reached the point where all I see is incompetence at West Ham. If Pellegrini does turn this round, you can't help shake the feeling that he will do so in spite of our Board rather than because of anything they will have done. 

The decision making processes - David Sullivan ringing up an agent, usually - are a nonsense and apparently not up for review. And so we bob along, floating from one typhoon to another, crashing on every possible rock on the way and shredding the nerves of all aboard. I don't actually know if can write about another season of this fucking madness. 

I took my youngest daughter on Saturday for her first ever game. And like her two older sisters she saw a dismal performance that ended with us losing in the last minute. Worse still was the ennui. I couldn't get her to care one way or another. Nothing about that place grabs children because it isn't designed to. And so she sat up in the high altitude seats, wondering why grown men behind her continued to swear loudly and angrily even with children in front of them, and when I asked up if she would like to come back she said answered with an emphatic "God, no".

You might roll your eyes when I talk of Sullivan ruining the club, but these are the little ripple effects. No Upton Park to carry her home on a wave of atmosphere and uniqueness, no decent team to electrify the pulse and capture her heart. Just a relentless succession of dreary, lifeless home performances every other Saturday, miles from the pitch and made worse by the knowledge that nothing better is round the corner. The only thing that impressed my daughter on Saturday was the neon blue Slushie she got from the kiosk. My cousin's son has been going for two years and still hasn't seen us win at home. I know I'm not alone - I've spoken to other parents who have the same problems. 

And as we left, on the long grey trek back to the station I had a pang for Upton Park that I haven't felt before. I felt we needed to leave to move forward, but now it's becoming clear that only one side of that bargain is being adhered to, I couldn't help but kick the ground in frustration. These fuckers had no right to move us when they didn't have the ability to keep their side of the deal. The best transfer window in our history will be the one that sees these owners leave. 

Anyway, welcome back - I hope you all had a nice summer holiday. 

On a more positive note, check out the Making Memories initiative from the lads at Hammers Chat, which is aimed at giving Hammers fans in need of help some assistance. It's a good idea, particularly if we're going to spend the year playing like this. 

West Ham 1 - 4 Manchester City (And Other Ramblings)

"I don't want to spend night after night with you

While you figure it out"

- She and Him, "I've Got Your Number, Son"

A LETTER TO DAVID SULLIVAN

Dear David

This is one of those open letters. God, how tedious of me. I've become one of "those" people.

I know, I know - I should be better than this. But then again, so should our team after eight years of your ownership and instead we're going to either go down or survive with fewer than forty points. Neither of us have much to shout about.

First question - where on earth do you get your jackets?

I should be writing about this game, but to be honest, I've got nothing left to say about West Ham capitulating at home. I've seen this game a dozen times already at the London Stadium since you moved us there. I don't know how many more times I can say that Cheikhou Kouyate is no longer in control of his own legs, or describe Javier Hernandez nearly breaking out into a walk.

So let's just talk, you and I. Two seriously pissed off West Ham fans with an eye on the future.

I'm guessing that this weekend was tough for you. Perhaps I'm naive but I still believe that you are a genuine supporter, albeit one with a remarkably high tolerance for the team you support being abysmal. I suspect it must be galling for you to sit in Director's Boxes with the officials of clubs like Burnley, Swansea and Brighton and have to offer up polite chit chat while the team you have assembled at such great cost gets destroyed in front of you. I can't believe that at least a couple of them haven't at least leaned over and whispered something along the lines of "David, old chap, not to pry but exactly how incriminating are the photographs that Patrice Evra has of you?".

You're not a quitter, you say. You're not walking away from a job half done. Fair enough, I suppose, although I think you might be pushing the limits of the word "half" there. It's the standard rhetoric of people in jobs that are beyond them, but which remunerate them handsomely. And rest assured, I think we are all aware that the several million pounds of interest that the club pays you each year probably helps to while away the hours on those long drives back down the M1 after yet another Northern shellacking. 

I happen to think that people who refuse to quit when they aren't up to the task are selfish. People mocked Kevin Keegan mercilessly but by resigning as England manager in 2001 he helped England to reach a World Cup, by admitting he wasn't up to it. I find that infinitely more courageous and honourable than sticking around despite all the evidence being that you don't possess the ability to do your job. I'm. Just. Saying. David.

***

But let's not get ahead of ourselves here. For our story begins some time ago. 2010, to be precise, and West Ham was a club on the precipice. We were, according to the BBC, "in 16th, in a season plagued by injuries and off field distractions". Seems a little outlandish, I know, but that's what they said. 

You described the situation thusly - "We have a short term goal to stay in the Premier League, and in the long term we'd like to be challenging for the top four and the Champions League....the club has such an unbalanced squad. We will be honest with the fans about the books and the crazy wages the Icelandic owners paid out that has brought the club to its knees". 

I won't lie, David, that last one is my favourite.

You finished up by saying "We're taking on a huge task at a club with enormous problems. It will take time for us to turn it around.". Remember what we were saying about a job half done? Time travellers from 2010 might wonder if you've even started at all. 

I should also add that there was also some stuff about how you always supported your managers, right before you fired Gianfranco Zola and replaced him with Avram Grant. For a bet, possibly. Anyway, we're five managers in now so I always figured that one was probably a joke. 

Plus ca change and all that, but I wonder if you ever sit at home, looking at those life-size waxwork butlers of yours and wonder whether you are in some mythical Greek hell?

I know I do.

In the same way that Tantalus is forever doomed to stand in a pool of water that recedes whenever he bends down to try and drink it, you seem destined to sit in the bottom half of the Premier League and watch poorer, smaller, but smarter, clubs breeze past you. 

It puzzles you, I'm sure, that fans aren't more grateful to you for saving us. I suppose that can be put down to the fact that a lot of fans don't really think you did. They saw a very wealthy individual swooping in and picking up a distressed asset that was always likely to produce a return with even a modicum of investment. Harsh, I suppose, but there you go.

There can be no denying that the clubs finances look an awful lot healthier now than they did in 2010, but of course this is largely due to the explosion in television rights. While Karren Brady might like to brag about turning around a failing business, most of us are a bit nonplussed by all that. The single best decision you made was to employ Sam Allardyce, at obscene expense, to ensure the club was back in the Premier League when the gravy train rolled into town. And if ever there was a man unlikely to miss a gravy train...

And a pint of fucking wine

***

I have no doubt that you are perplexed as to why exactly a home defeat to Manchester City would inspire all this angst among supporters. After all, City beat everybody, have unlimited funds and scored a couple of flukey goals. Their dominance says an awful lot more about the job being done by the men who run the Premier League and UEFA than it does about you. And, in isolation I'd agree with you. 

I don't understand why so many fans are upset about a supposed lack of effort when it seems clear to me that David Moyes had instructed the team to sit off and hold their shape to try and deny City space behind our defence. We did this at the Etihad to great effect, and I suppose you could say it sort of worked here for about ten minutes. City scored through a deflection and an own goal, both of which were unfortunate but exactly the kinds of goals that you let in when you are shit. And David, before you protest, we are absolutely fucking shit.

But I'm not sure it's this particular defeat that's really the point here. It's the fact that every single one of us knew it was coming. I knew it was coming. You knew it was coming too. I know you did. 

Since moving to the London Stadium we have played the current Big Six on thirteen occasions. We have won three (God bless London derbies), drawn once, and lost nine. In those games we have scored ten goals and conceded thirty four. Holy Shit, Dave! THIRTY FOUR. It's not just that we're terrible, it's that we're reliably terrible. 

We've never once scored four goals in a game at our home ground, and yet Manchester City have done it three times. Once upon a time you could judge a teams title credentials by how they fared at Upton Park, but under your watch, we now get to see how they would play in testimonials. I honestly thought Kevin de Bruyne was going to fall asleep yesterday.

I am incredibly bored!

Whether you accept it or not, the fact that we don't even remotely compete in games against one third of the division is a pretty good reason for the widespread apathy that is surging through your core support like poison through a bloodstream.

***

But I'm sure, you're sitting there fed up at having your efforts ripped to shreds. What of Dimitri Payet? What about that season of finishing seventh? And you'd be right. That was a great season. You should have bought a decent striker in January, of course, but instead did it on the cheap and missed out on a Champions League spot that was begging to be taken. I often wonder about that, and I'm sure you do too. Some better refereeing and Charlie Austin instead of Emmanuel Emenike and who knows where we would all be right now. 

But if wishes were horses, I'd be dragging Nigel Farage through the streets of Calais behind my carriage. We blew it and then returned immediately to the stagnant mediocrity that has been the hallmark of your ownership. Barring that one marvellous season when the Premier League went crazy, big teams fell and little teams rose and bloody Leicester won the league, we have been unrelentingly boring to support. I can describe it in no other way. West Ham on the pitch are generally one of the most tedious sides in the land.

We've got a live one

We just...exist. Drifting aimlessly through seasons, lurking in the bottom half of the table leaving nary a footprint in the sand. All of our impact is on the back pages, as we lurch from crisis to crisis, amusing the world as we go. We are irrelevant on the pitch and shambolic off it, and there is nobody to be blamed for that other than you. I resent being asked to give you my season ticket money before the end of the season because I feel like I will just be endorsing you to go out and waste it once more.

Let me ask you a question, David, if I may. Is there any challenge in your role? By which I mean, does anyone ever tell you that what you're doing is wrong? If not, perhaps you ought to ask yourself why.

Once, many years ago, I worked for a brief time at a place that had a "hands on" owner. The company had two security guards, one of whom worked from 5am until 1pm, and the other from 12pm until 8pm. They had a handover period of one hour in the middle. One day the owner turned up for an operations meeting and noticed them both at reception. Troubled by such an unnecessary display of manpower, he told his operational team to fire one of them because it was ludicrous to waste money like that. Given how long ago it was, this might have saved the company around £25,000 per year.

The problem with this was that it meant we had one security guard to cover fifteen hours. In the end, he did the early shift and the company paid the landlord of the building to have someone come and lock up. The cost of this service? £40,000 per year.

Whether that is apocryphal or not, I don't know, but it was told around the corridors as being true. And nobody was surprised because the distinguishing characteristic of that business was that anybody close to the owner just mumbled in agreement and told him what he was saying was great. It led to a very well paid senior management and a very poorly run company.

Challenge is a good thing, David. People disagreeing with you is healthy, because it introduces some rigour to your decision making process. Getting people into positions of seniority who have a backbone and some vision is a really healthy thing for a company to do. I understand that long term strategic thinking wasn't a huge part of your success in porn or property, but it couldn't be more vital to the industry in which you currently operate. You keep telling us that the manager must have the final say on transfers despite employing five in eight years. Any player signing on anything longer than a two year deal is likely to outlast the manager he signs for. Can you not see that this is a nonsense?

If nothing else, please look around. Examine what is working for those other smaller clubs who have gone skating past you so easily. You need some help. You've done your best, no doubt, but there is so much more intellectual horsepower in those clubs it's not even a fair fight. They have long term business plans that allow them to think further ahead than the next transfer window, and they don't lurch alarmingly from one crisis to another. It's pretty tough to admit, but when your business is failing and you've changed the staff, the place you do business and the management then perhaps it might be time to admit that the only thing left to change is...you.

***

But before you get too excited about making lots of changes, David, I'd like to ask one more thing of you. When you come to make those decisions - please don't do anything for public approval. I know it's been your preferred method to road test ideas by disseminating them through various social media outlets and then gauging public response, but this highlights everything that is wrong with your leadership. Your job isn't to satisfy fans before the season, it's to do it at the end.

I know fans are a nightmare. How can you appease people who scream that they want a high energy pressing game and then scream even louder for Hernandez to be on the pitch? What hope do you have of reasoning with people who insist on playing 4-4-2 without acknowledging that we don't actually have anyone who can play wide in midfield? Where do you go with supporters who criticise Moyes for not instilling a sense of organisation and professionalism into his team and then side with professional waster Andy Carroll because he didn't walk straight back into the team after being out for months? What is up with people who plaster pictures of themselves in the San Siro all over their social media accounts and then tell you they're giving up their season tickets because they're sick of the number of tourists in the stadium?

But that's the point, really - fans are emotional and illogical and moody, but the simple thing we all want is success. Produce a better team and we will fall in line. You need to stop taking short cuts and start working to some semblance of a plan. Or better yet, employ some people to design and implement that plan, because this current squad you have assembled is one of the worst I've ever seen and fans have every right to be pissed off about it.

Not that logical, shockingly

None of which is to say that fans aren't important. We're crucial. But we need you to listen to us on other things, because you've currently got it the wrong way round. And so you stay silent when our fans are threatened, when the stewarding is unsafe, when we are campaigning for safe standing and when that godforsaken fucking stadium turns out to be a total disaster, but find the time to canvas opinion about whether we should sign El Hadji Diouf. This is madness.

Any business making strategic decisions to gain short term approval from their customers is doomed to fail. If you had any belief in your own vision, you wouldn't care remotely for public opinion. Instead we have this strange briefing against Moyes now to prepare the ground for letting him go in the summer. I happen to think Moyes would be a poor appointment, but still the best you could realistically manage, although either way that's not terribly important.

What's important is your long term plan. How do you want to play? What type of team are you trying to build? What profile of player are you targeting and how do you plan to attract them? If Moyes is your ideal candidate then back him and commit to the plan. The problem is that you and I both know that no such template exists. Instead, everything is geared to short term survival and kicking problems down the road until you eventually sell the club and can leave them for the next guy to resolve.

And there's the rub. When you took us from Upton Park you ripped the soul out of the club. But crucially you didn't replace it with anything. I would suggest that the only thing that could really have worked is to have replaced it with a brain. A razor sharp, young, progressive, cutting edge managerial set up that could have bridged the gap between us and the elite. I can't tell you how often I daydream of West Ham Red Bull, David, because it would be no further removed from the West Ham of my youth than your version, and a damn sight more successful.

Instead...nothing. Just the same unimaginative approach that you have always employed, and in the end it has led us to where you have always ended up. At the bottom.

I should add that none of this is personal. I think you're a businessman who saw an opportunity to profit and you took it. But the issue is that you haven't given us anything. Absolutely nothing. Not the stadium, not the team, not the managers, not the Academy, not even any glimmer of hope for the future. And if your plan is to just hang on to the club until the restrictive covenants are lifted and then sell for the biggest profit possible, then you need to be aware of what that will mean for your legacy. And perhaps you won't care, and perhaps your sons won't care, but you'll be forever known as the guy who destroyed West Ham.

I hope it doesn't come to that, David, I really don't. It doesn't need to. We have attributes that other clubs would kill for. Stand aside and let people who know what they are doing utilise them. Look to Kevin Keegan - admit you're not up to it. There really is no shame in it.

Yours sincerely,


HeadHammerShark
Disgruntled of Block 256

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.