West Ham 1 - 1 Stoke (And Other Ramblings)

"Well, 'round here baby

I've learned you get what you can get"

- Bruce Springsteen, "Tougher Than The Rest"

Not every win comes in the form of a victory. On a night where we had the contemporaneous sense of wild joy at a late equaliser, and coursing disappointment at the failure to truly separate ourselves from the relegation quagmire, it is worth noting that the main success here was what we did to our opposition rather than anything we did for ourselves. 

After this game, we sit with a 3% chance of relegation according to the folks at FiveThirtyEight. Football games aren't played on hard drives, of course, but it's comforting to know that the nerds have trained their gaze elsewhere, even though you do get the sense that a 3% relegation shot could be a very "hold my beer" moment for a kamikaze club such as ourselves. By comforting comparison, however, Stoke have a 93% chance of going down, which is the kind of thing you would generally only write about members of the Trump administration. 

Chicharito wins "Best Gladiator Impression"

But in truth, these are the amnesiac nights of the football season. Consigned almost immediately to the long term memory and only recalled years later when someone reminds you of the time our Vice Chairman once advised everybody to watch her new show on ITV and forgot we were playing at the same time.

These are the least glamorous inches on the mediocre road to safety that we now seem to tread so routinely, with the honourable exception of the 2015-16 season. These are the points that are so necessary for survival and simultaneously so damaging to the notion that this club is going anywhere soon. It's not even that we played that badly, and in fact it might be the opposite; we played reasonably well but still didn't have the guile or craft to put away a side who are deservedly going to be relegated.

It's fine to respect the point, and I doubt that many fans are struggling to see the bigger picture here. Stay above the stragglers and get through to the next transfer window when everything will be magically resolved by the people who messed up the last five. This time next year, Rodders.

But I wonder if there isn't a fatigue setting in among the fanbase. The underwhelmed reaction to this point, and the generally directionless nature of the club has lent the place an air of terminal decline. We will survive this year due to the bottom half of the Premier League being as good as that Robbie Williams Rat Pack album, but it's not fooling anyone anymore. We can only limp along for so long before one day taking a permanent stumble, especially when almost every lower league club is now run better than us.

We are in dire need of a change.

***

"And I know, and you know it too, that a love like ours is terrible news

But that won't stop me cryin', no that won't stop me cryin' over you"

- She and Him, "Thieves"

Which brings me neatly to David Moyes. 

Slaven Bilic took just 9 points from his 11 games this season which would have put him on pace for a 31 point season. That is not good. I looked it up. 

Moyes, meanwhile, has presided over 22 games and swept up 24 points. Over a full season, that would give us 41 points and a nice relegation battle to fret over and ultimately win. This is an imperfect and only minimally useful comparison because of the nuance involved but it does at least highlight that Bilic was woeful this season. It is also unfair on Moyes because Bilic had five transfer windows to build his own team and used them to construct the second oldest squad in the division. Moyes has had one window during which he got drunk, went to Preston with £10m and woke up with Jordan Hugill in his squad. We've all been there. 

I find the nostalgic pining for Bilic baffling on many levels, and I haven't even got into comparing the difficulty of their respective fixtures, but let's just say I think that they almost had to fire Bilic before we went to Man City just to stop us being the first ever Premier League team to concede ten goals. 

Kept it in single figures, lads!

But being better than Bilic isn't really the point here. The question is whether Moyes would actually be a good appointment or not, and that's a more difficult query to answer. I think most fans are starting to wake up to the fact that the biggest issue with the Premier League is not a reliance on foreign managers, but the endless fascination with mediocre British types. This is probably a little unfair on Moyes as he has been demonstrably better than the likes of Pulis, Allardyce and Pardew throughout his career, but that's the perception of him now. A stolid, average manager for middle of the road clubs. Be still our beating hearts. 

And the wider context is that West Ham is currently a febrile, uncertain beast. The board are despised for sins both imagined and real, and while the Directors presumably crave a boring, steady season where we bounce around in eleventh all year, the truth is that they probably need something more to regain some of what has been lost. And Moyes is not that. He would be a Roundhead appointment for what is currently - rightly or wrongly - a Cavalier fanbase. 

Fans want to dream. West Ham is ripe for a generational change and never has a club been more ready for a visionary manager to arrive and sweep all before him. We're sick of looking at Pochettino working the oracle at Spurs, as their impressive new stadium springs up around them, and wondering why it's not us. Here we are with 50,000 season ticket holders, the best catchment area for youth players in the country and an enormous wage bill and yet nobody at the club seems to have any idea how to harness all of that. There is such a person out there for us somewhere, but it requires judgement, knowledge and courage to go and find him, and none of these are qualities possessed by the decision makers at West Ham. 

Thus it comes to pass that Moyes is probably the best appointment for West Ham. He's here, he knows the squad, knows who he needs to keep and who to move on and, perhaps most importantly, seems prepared to take the job despite knowing that he would be working for the worst run club in the country. It's easy to dream on Nagelsmann, Favre, Tedesco and my secret love - hear me out here - Joachim Low, but those are not realistic. We are too badly run, with too tarnished a reputation to get such luminaries through our door. 

So, given such an ultra realistic appraisal I can find no better candidate than Moyes because I don't think anyone better would come. He's probably the best appointment we can make, and yet I strongly doubt he is actually a good choice. There is an outside chance that he might repeat his Everton trick and turn us into something decent over a long period of time, but even that chills the heart a little. We didn't move to this stadium for a rebuilding project. This was supposed be the culmination of a long term plan and instead we arrived at the restaurant for dinner and found out that the chef had forgotten to turn the oven on.

***

"Help me out of the life I lead

Remember the promise that you made"

- Cock Robin, "The Promise You Made"

Having said all that, I think Moyes would probably be a decent choice as Director of Football, except for the fact that this morning David Sullivan revealed he is now planning to renege on his promise to hire anyone for that role. Leaving aside for a moment the blunt force stupidity of allowing a job applicant to set the parameters of their position, it's a fascinating development. Sullivan made the promise under the duress of fan protests and the white hot focus of the national media. Everything he said about the role strongly suggested that he didn't understand it, although that's rather par for the course these days, but to go back on such a promise will only further cement his reputation as a liar.

In fairness to Sullivan his counter argument is that he never actually promised a Director of Football, but instead an "entirely new way of signing players". As far as I can tell this looks very much like the old way, where a Chief Scout - this used to be Tony Henry before he redefined the word "mayhem" - finds players and the manager signs off on them. Brilliant. There is no acknowledgement that a proper Director of Football would bring all sorts of other benefits to the club, because Sullivan doesn't understand what the role should entail.

What's particularly bemusing, is that having spent the season blaming Bilic for assembling this hopeless squad, he is now handing over the reins to allow Moyes the freedom to do exactly the same. If this is true we can all look forward to another squad constructed solely to meet the whim of one person, who is one six game winless run from losing his job, and with Sullivan having further destroyed what little credibility he has left with the fans. Oh well - I suppose that going back on such a well publicised concession to supporters would be a fairly significant "fuck you" to those who have questioned his leadership (ie: everyone), but it's a remarkable piece of backsliding from where we were just two weeks ago. Whatever your thoughts on the fan protests, it should be acknowledged that the toothpaste is well and truly out of that tube if the board are already comfortable enough to start rewriting history.

What's also magnificent about this is the timing, as it comes just days after Sullivan wrote an angry piece in the programme demanding that fans acknowledge that he has sanctioned far higher spending than "the so called experts" would have us believe, and then trotting out the biannual line about strengthening in the next transfer window, which by now should really be the club motto. Sullivan was keen to "dispel a myth" by writing the piece, although he wasn't so keen that he felt the need to include any actual numbers in there. The curious thing about all of this is that he appears not to realise that spending loads of money on a terrible team isn't actually a good thing.

I used to read stuff like this with a rising sense of anger. How could these useless charlatans have taken over my club and why aren't more people angrier about their incompetence? I still have that dull ache at the back of my mind, but it's been replaced somewhat by a more mystified feeling. I watch them now in the same way one watches a hopeless DIY'er. Like viewing a man changing his wiring while standing in a bucket of water, I no longer despair of the idiocy and instead marvel at the ignorance of it all. How are they still alive? Why is that ladder balancing on a beach ball? Why check a gas leak using a match for illumination? Is he really checking to see if that gun is loaded by peering down the barrel?

And David Sullivan did gaze with great pride upon his handiwork

I have said this before, so please excuse the repetition, but the biggest danger this club faces is apathy. Fans speak often about turning our back but that is usually just the post match disappointment talking. Come season ticket renewal time, when the sun is out and the red tops have been laced with false promises, it is never a chore to summon up enough misplaced faith to sign up once more. But this time feels a bit different. It's not so much that the team is bad - and it is very bad - but that there is so little for us to connect to as fans. The club has no vision, Upton Park has gone and been replaced imperfectly, and the people in charge didn't seem to care when fans were being threatened if they protested against them.

It's been a dismal season and I find it hard to believe that David Moyes is the right man to lift us out of that, even if I greatly admire some of what he has done. We need a Director of Football more than any other team around, and appointing one would at last have been a nod to the realities of the modern game and an admission that the era of running the team like we were in a DeLorean and it was 1983, were over. Instead, no. They took the barrel of that gun and aimed it squarely at their own feet.

Godspeed, David. I think you're going to need it.

***

"You say you saw him laughing, I hope it's true

I'd like to see it happen. I hope it's true."

- Belly, "Seal My Fate"

Even as this game was minutes from starting, our Karren was on Twitter urging people to watch her new show starting on ITV at the same time. It's called "Give It A Year" and involves her visiting struggling businesses and then returning a year later to see what progress they have made under her watchful eye. It is powered mainly by irony, presumably.

It sounds delightful because there is hardly anything that needs doing at West Ham and even though she earns just under a million quid a year for her role as Director in Charge of Not Listening To Fans, it's nice that Karren can stave off poverty by adding another string to her bow. I didn't see the show but apparently there is a bakery in Oxford who signed Robert Snodgrass and are now thriving, and a dressmakers in Carlisle who now wave loads of flags around outside their premises and all their issues are fixed, so that's good. If this series goes well it will apparently return next year when Theresa May is going to help Commonwealth countries fix their immigration policies. 

Anyway, for those who resisted the allure of watching Karren destroy the concept of satire, there was a game to watch. And what a game it wasn't, as Caley Graphics shows above.

Stoke arrived with their familiar brand of earthy physicality, elbows and constant fouling and allied that with the late season desperation of a team on Death Row. Moyes countered with his now standard 3-4-3 variant setup and has been slaughtered for such negativity despite the fact it looked pretty similar to the team that beat Southampton so easily.

One major difference between then and now was that Stoke actually brought a defence with them, but also our key players were a little off the boil. Marko Arnautovic huffed and puffed without ever quite hitting the heights of that day, while Edimilson Fernandes wandered around lost and bewildered by what was unfurling around him.

We therefore played nicely but without much urgency, and struggled to break the enormous line of Terracotta Soldiers that Paul Lambert deployed to keep us at bay. Such physicality needs to be played around, but we lacked the necessary invention or guile to do so, and even though Mark Noble probed and prodded intelligently from his deep lying position we were missing too much ahead of him. No Antonio or Lanzini to draw attention from him, and although we passed the ball well enough we couldn't really free a subdued Arthur Masuaku or the Ancient Mariner in our wide positions.

For all their time wasting - Ryan Shawcross apparently ties his boots with stinging nettles - and repetitive fouling that went ludicrously unpunished, Stoke were actually creating some reasonable half chances, and Mame Biram Diouf blazed over the best opportunity of the game in the second half. As it was, they eventually scrambled a lead when Joe Hart Joe Harted a shot from Shaqiri and Twitter personality Peter Crouch popped up with a tap in. I missed the Chelsea game and I'm now wondering if I'm going to go the whole season without seeing Joe Hart play well. He looked like a burst balloon, his confidence whistling out into the night sky.

At this point, Moyes did what he should have done far earlier and threw his reinforcements on. Lanzini arrived and then shortly after, so did Carroll, who was slung into the fray like a fireball catapulted into a medieval battle - with the knowledge that he might just destroy everything but what the fuck, we're losing anyway.

And so it was that just a few minutes later Aaron Cresswell swung over a hopeful cross and the pissed Geordie Wicker Man performed his yearly Chun Li Spinning Bird Kick and rescued us a point with a superb finish. On such nights, it sure is handy to have such a weapon on the bench and this was a near perfect deployment.

Shawcross tying up his shoelaces just out of shot

As it was we could have had a winner just moments later when Chicharito beat an abysmal Jack Butland dive from twenty yards but Carroll was penalised for handball, despite clearly being fouled by Shawcross at the time. In fairness to referee Michael Oliver, he's had a bit of a bad week with last minute penalties.

***

"And now the future's definition is so much higher than it was last year

It's like the images have all become real"

- Father John Misty, "Total Entertainment Forever"

One thought that seems to have been successfully inculcated into the collective groupthink of West Ham fans is that Moyes is somehow misusing Javier Hernandez. The Mexican is now a regular on the bench and was deployed to dramatic effect at Chelsea when his laser precision finish salvaged us an unlikely point.

But for all that, I see him as little more than a luxury that we can ill afford. As a central forward he offers nothing - no link up play, no mobility, no running the channels, no physical presence, nothing except a world class penalty box finishing ability. And that's the rub. How can a team as bad as us pass up any player with that level of skill?

Well, for an answer to that, one has to look at the games we've played where Hernandez was anonymous. Spurs away, Arsenal in the cup - we may as well have played with ten men. For all that it's easy to criticise Moyes and demand that he find a way of playing to suit Hernandez, I can't see what that actually would be. His time at Manchester United and Real Madrid was marked by those teams playing around him and dominating the opposition. The ball was frequently in that penalty area for him to latch on to, and tellingly, he was still a substitute for most of the time.

Fans need to let Hernandez go. A mid table team can't afford the extravagance of sinking £100,000 a week into a player who only plays fifteen minutes a game, and Hernandez shouldn't be doing much more than that. Tactically our best moments this season have come when Arnautovic has been deployed as a striker and freed up from doing any defensive work. Playing Hernandez pushes him deeper, and so too Antonio if he is fit, where their total lack of defensive effort is badly exposed.

This chain reaction through the team is what precipitated the move to three centre backs, as Moyes desperately sought ways to make us a bit more solid while still allowing him room to deploy his attacking players. This, in turn, pushed Zabaleta to a wing back role and badly exposed the fact that our central midfielders are way below average. An interesting thought experiment is to ask yourself which players from this squad you would keep if you were building a team from scratch.

I would take Ogbonna, Rice, Lanzini and Arnautovic. Cresswell and Masuaku are borderline, while Noble and Adrian would be valuable squad members. Beyond that I wouldn't be bothered about keeping any of them particularly and would be willing to load Joe Hart into a wheelbarrow and walk him back to Manchester. Clearly there are young players like Fernandes and Oxford who might mature into decent players in the future, and it's worth remembering that Ogbonna looked a busted flush at the start of the season so one has to ponder the effect of injuries on the likes of Obiang, but I can't see any other particular value in the squad.

Reid, Carroll and Antonio are too injury prone and the rest simply aren't up to it. Every time a West Ham fan demands a contract extension for James Collins a fairy is brutally butchered in the Welsh valleys. So stop it.

It's not much. Moyes has much work to do and not much time in which to do it. He might come to regret not having an experienced Director of Football to help him with a task of this size. If it's true that he has won that argument with the club, then he is taking a huge responsibility on to his shoulders. It might be worth remembering that not every win is a victory. 

Stoke 0 - 3 West Ham (And Other Ramblings)

"Honey, it's been a long time waiting

Such a long, long time

But I can't stop now"

- Embrace, "Gravity"

We may be into territory where we need to admit something here. It's been around eighteen months since I started writing The H List again on a regular basis, inspired by the nascent exhilaration of the 2015/16 season, and during that time the club have managed to get pretty much everything wrong. The stadium move was a painful disappointment, the transfer dealings have resembled a Brewster's Millions remake and the ongoing saga over when Slaven Bilic would be fired did little to suggest that the Directors of the club had any idea what they were doing. 

I've finally found a manager in a worse position than me!

But as David Moyes' new look West Ham side swept away a woeful Stoke City, it occurred to me that we probably need to acknowledge that David Sullivan may have played a blinder here. When Moyes was first mooted as a possible successor to Bilic I fell into the same trap as many, painting him as a cheap, busted flush who had failed for five years and somehow managed to threaten a female journalist in his last job. 

I'm still uncomfortable at the last point, but that might be a discussion about contrition and punishment for another day. As it is, Moyes seems rejuvenated. He no longer has the thousand yard stare of a three tour Vietnam veteran and instead looks like a man in control of his own destiny once more. By contrast, Mark Hughes wears the permanent sneer of a man who haggles in Poundland, and I don't mind admitting I'll raise a glass when he gets his P45 for Christmas. I suspect it will be bitter, much like the Welshman. 

It's too soon to be feting Sullivan as a genius, especially given that the reason for the precarious nature of our current position is that he persisted far too long with Bilic when he'd clearly lost his way. But if he has to carry the can for that inertia, then he should also get the credit for this - currently - good looking appointment. It has been a long time since I've seen a West Ham team go away from home like this and simply dismantle an opponent with fast, incisive counterattacking and a solid defence. It won't always be this way, of course, but if we can't take a moment to drink in a victory like this, and simultaneously revel in the disappointment of our vanquished opponent, then what the hell are we here for? It's this misplaced sense of superiority which binds us all together as football fans, after all. 

***

"I went out into the night, I went out to find some light
Kids are swinging from the power lines, nobody's home so nobody minds"
- Arcade Fire, "Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)"

This game ended up kicking off an hour late because Mark Hughes got into an argument with a traffic warden and staged a one man sit in outside the Britannia Stadium gates. This prevented electricians from getting in to restore power to the area and the stand off was only ended when some local children agreed to pay the £60 fine for Hughes. I imagine. 

Uncle Mark's coming for Christmas, kids!

It's always a little disconcerting for fans when things like this happen, as you never quite know how players will react to small changes in routine. The extra hour of warming up, or physio or sitting around listening to music affect different people in different ways. We came flying out of the traps, however, and settled into a nice looking style of play where Manuel Lanzini was able to get forward in support of Marko Arnautovic and Michail Antonio. Without the constant need to worry about losing the ball and not getting it back for ages - as with recent weeks - we pushed our wing backs further forward, and noticeably sought to play higher up the pitch than we did against the good teams we've been playing lately. 

I am slowly coming to terms with our front two comprising a pair of converted wide forwards, because both are physically strong and have enough mobility to stretch defences. It is a far cry from watching us smash it long towards Andy Carroll in the manner of kids launching water balloons at an abandoned tree house, after all. So it was that we had a number of early long range chances, as we used our smaller share of possession much more incisively than the home team. Antonio and Lanzini had sighters and generally we carried a sense of menace that has been absent for a while, as that front pair pushed and pulled the immobile Stoke backline out of their preferred positions, and received a few bruised ankles for their troubles. 

We were very fortunate to take the lead, however, as Ryan Shawcross took a break from kicking Antonio to head a cross against a post. Thereafter followed the big controversy of the game as Lanzini carried the ball seventy yards before falling under the challenge of Erik Pieters. I thought that Masuaku committed a foul before it got to the Argentine anyway, but there's no denying that his run was brilliant and also that Pieters was stupid to go to ground in the box and not get anywhere near the ball. 

But we also have to accept that diving is a blight on the game and, while I feel no sympathy for Stoke, we do need to try and eradicate it because decisions like this can just as easily go against us. So, although I thought Lanzini went over slightly in anticipation of a physical contact that never really came, he bought the penalty with a dive and had it been at the other end I would have been fuming. 

As I write this, Lanzini has been charged and will miss the next two games. I'm not unhappy about divers being punished but there are a couple of points to observe here. One is that players will now have to take oncoming contact in incidents such as these. I guess that's fine until you have to play against, well, Stoke and Ryan Shawcross comes a knockin'. Secondly, this creates a huge imbalance in the disciplinary process whereby players who are booked for a foul cannot be punished later, even when a red card is merited. Therefore we get a situation where Harry Kane and Dele Alli can commit red card tackles in the game at Manchester City and yet neither will miss a match, while Lanzini misses two for an offence that didn't physically endanger anybody. That isn't fair. 

It's worth keeping an eye on who gets punished under these rules too. We all like to highlight opposition players who dive - Kane, Jamie Vardy, Raheem Sterling and Ashley Young off the top of my head - but don't like to accept it when it's closer to home. Lanzini dived and deserves a punishment, but there will be plenty of others who will do the same this season and I will be very interested to see how many Top Six players are hit under the same rules. I'm also slightly perplexed that players who go down in a game and are noticed will get either a booking or nothing, but players punished retrospectively get a two game ban. That seems...inconsistent. 

After all of that, Mark Noble stepped up on his 300th Premier League appearance for us and gave us a deserved lead. As we saw at Everton a couple of weeks back, it's very useful to have a man who can hold his nerve in such situations. 

***

"But now it's come to distances and both of us must try

Your eyes are soft with sorrow

Hey, that's no way to say goodbye"

- Leonard Cohen, "Hey, That's No Way To Say Goodbye"

Stoke fans have not reacted well to Marko Arnautovic heading south in pursuit of fame and glory and, well, yes loads more money. We're in no position to talk, of course, given that there are West Ham fans who were not born until the Nineties but still boo Paul Ince's son, for reasons they know not why. We hold grudges better than anyone, and in fact I feel it might very well be our defining feature as supporters. Cross us and we will boo the shit out of you forty years later when you're trying to buy a mobility scooter. 

What is odd though, is that even the most one eyed Stoke fan can surely see the logic behind his decision. West Ham can pay far more in wages than Stoke, so it's perfectly logical that a 28 year old, signing his last long term deal, would plump for the club that can pay him the most. I won't even descend into the parochial rabbit warren of arguing whether London is a better place to live than Stoke, but just purely from a financial standpoint it is an obvious decision. Stoke fans will of course argue that West Ham is a basket case club, but when the options on the table are "earn the same and stay at this middling Premier League club" or "earn more and move to this basket case middling Premier League club" I simply cannot see how there can ever be any surprise when a player chooses the latter.

Arnie, here, Adebayoring it very nicely indeed

It probably didn't hurt that good ol' Slaven was doing the buying because you get the sense that Moyes wouldn't ever buy a player like Arnautovic, even if he is doing a substantially better job than Bilic of utilising him. It also couldn't have hurt to have been leaving Mark Hughes behind, given that he has the permanent expression of a man who heckles children at school assemblies.

What is even stranger about all this is that the Stoke fans then dished out all the abuse they could manage and then still seemed utterly shocked - SHOCKED I TELL YOU - to discover that Arnautovic would then want to give them some back when he scored. Even better was Hughes giving him some abuse as he walked off, and then later expressing his disappointment that Arnautovic had responded at all. Then we got the usual bullshit about how Stoke had "taken a chance" on him when nobody else would, and he should have repaid that faith. Yeah, calm down Sparky - you're making it sound like you recruited him to the Dirty Dozen from Death Row. Arnautovic is a professional footballer who was playing for Werder Bremen at a level very similar to the one he found in England. Football fans and managers love to pull out the sanctimony card, but the reality is that clubs like Stoke can drop £2m on a player like him without blinking an eyelid, so portraying that as a huge risk is mendacious and patronising.

So, he played very well for Stoke and then saw an opportunity for a big payday and took it, and in doing so displayed all the loyalty to Stoke that they would have shown him if he'd broken his leg six months from the end of his contract. And talking of that, it's worth remembering that when Stoke fans try and clamber on to the high ground they do so as a bunch who booed Aaron Ramsey for having the temerity to have his leg shattered by one of their players. Football fans are a strange bunch.

This is a ruthless business and while I understand the frustration at losing players to a team they think (incorrectly) that they are better than, I struggle to get how Stoke fans feel that some type of blood oath has been shattered. I would give them the same advice I give myself whenever we encounter our own Arnautovic types - Hi Dimitri! - forget about the players, we're cheering for laundry.

***

"Well, I'm so tired of crying

But I'm out on the road again, I'm on the road again"

- Willie Nelson, "On The Road Again"

I feel I should also point out, for any of you who missed the game, that although a 3-0 win where the opposition are restricted to no shots on target sounds like a comfortable win, it didn't necessarily always feel that way. This was primarily due to us missing more chances than one could have conceivably believed without prior knowledge of a match fixing scandal. Arnautovic alone had five clear chances before scoring, and hit the woodwork twice, and generally looked like he would never score, until he did. After Diafra Sakho was introduced he also had a couple of good chances himself, including one where he attempted to manoeuvre the ball in using just his groin, which was an admittedly interesting development.

Thus, there was a cavalcade of "Mighty Ducks" style misses before Arnautovic finally scored in the 75th minute. He then left the field four minutes later to the sound of Hughes berating him for not signing up to his petition demanding that spikes be placed in doorways all through Stoke to deter homeless people from sleeping there, 'cos "they'll never learn otherwise, Beryl". Probably. 

Sakho then popped up with a third, and we could easily have grabbed a fourth but for Hernandez shooting from a tight angle when Lanzini was unmarked about eight fucking inches from goal. It is superbly churlish to say it, but we actually missed out on a chance to massage our goal difference a bit in this game.

The Caley Graphics shot map does show that Stoke had some decent chances, albeit they never managed to direct any on target. The best of them fell to Ryan Shawcross when the score was still at 1-0, but because he was unmarked in the area he had nobody to kick, and thus with all his focus on an actual footballing skill, he headed it over.

What is immediately noticeable about our chances is how many were inside the box and how many were really high quality chances. By contrast, Stoke had a lot of efforts but had nine blocked compared to just one for us. We managed to get seven efforts on target, compared to none for Stoke, and also hit the bar twice. That is a good day at the office.

We also absorbed the loss of Winston Reid to suspension by bringing in James Collins, a man with the distribution qualities of an Amazon delivery driver. Still, even with Collins smacking it over the neighbour's gate every so often, we still built nicely from the back, and really got purring late in the day when Stoke advanced and left space for Lanzini to run riot. I continue to be astounded at the deathbed conversions of Ogbonna and Cresswell who have transformed themselves from shell shocked Tommies to confident SAS types in the space of a month, and it says much for the system that Moyes is building that this was the third different iteration of his three at the back system, and we've still only conceded to Manchester City using it. Rice for Reid for Collins and everything has kept on rolling as it is. That's how it's supposed to be.

When Bilic left we had one wheel firmly in the ditch by the side of the road, the airbags had gone off, the hazard lights were flashing and someone had left the radio tuned to bloody Capital, with a broken volume setting. In short...hell. What Moyes has done is dragged us out of that ditch and put us firmly back on the road again. We're only at the beginning of the journey, but I'm certainly encouraged by the fact that the driver at least appears to know which way he's supposed to be going.

***

"No sweeping exit, or offstage lines

Could make me feel bitter, or treat you unkind"

- Gram Parsons, "Wild Horses"

With a corner definitively turned and everything on the up, it could be argued that we could really have done without an away cup quarter final at Arsenal. Unfortunately, given the size and quality of their squad it's hard to see that we'll get much change out of a well rested set of Arsenal reserves, especially without Lanzini and Arnautovic who both look like they will be missing.

It's worth pointing out that if we didn't get bad draws in cup competitions we wouldn't ever get pulled out of the hat. Of course, we can't say for certain that's what happened this time as Carabao conducted entire thing offscreen in a not-at-all-suspicious draw that miraculously kept all of the biggest teams apart. Presumably someone had overheated the balls before hand and one had burst in to flames and set the whole set on fire.

As it is, our draws since the beginning of the 2014/15 season are as follows:

2014/15

League Cup

Sheffield United (h) : 1-1 (Lost on penalties, those useless bastards)

FA Cup

Everton (a)  : 1-1
Everton (h) : 2-2 (Won on penalties, those wonderful bastards)
Bristol City (a) : 1-0
WBA (a) : 0-4 (That's right - four. FOUR fucking nil to West Fucking Brom)

2015/16

League Cup

Leicester (a) : 1-2

FA Cup

Wolves (h) : 1-0
Liverpool (a) : 0-0
Liverpool (h) : 2-1
Blackburn (a) : 5-1
Man Utd (a) : 1-1
Man Utd (h) : 1-2

2016/17

League Cup

Accrington Stanley (h) : 1-0
Chelsea (h) : 2-1
Man Utd (a) : 1-4

FA Cup

Man City (h) : 0-5

2017/18

League Cup

Cheltenham (a) : 2-0
Bolton (h) : 3-0
Spurs (a) : 3-2
Arsenal (a) : Erm

FA Cup

Shrewsbury (a) : Double erm

"Do you think they'll notice we haven't actually done a draw?"

So for anyone keeping score at home that's each of the self styled Big Six, including Manchester United twice away from home in quarter finals. In addition, we managed to get Leicester away in their title winning season, and of the eighteen draws made in that time we've been away on twelve occasions. I've not got too much time for conspiracy theories on that last point, as rigging draws to keep us from playing at home really would be a spectacular waste of time and effort, but in general nothing would surprise me less than a revelation that Cup sponsors are able to request that bigger teams are kept apart in the draw.

So it's a bit unlucky, and tomorrow nights game comes in the middle of a run of important league fixtures where we absolutely have to pick up points. At this early stage, with Lanzini suspended, Noble and Fernandes apparently injured, and Kouyate still a doubt, it does rather beg the question of who plays in midfield. People might be yelling for Sead Haksabanovic and Domingos Quina, but chucking two 18 year olds in to face Arsenal seems like a recipe for disaster, especially as another - Declan Rice - will presumably be playing as well. It's at times like this that it seems even more foolhardy to have the likes of Josh Cullen and Reece Oxford warming the benches of other clubs when they could be playing in games like these, but perhaps that's hindsight gone too far.

So we travel to the Emirates more in hope than expectation, although that was pretty much the same deal when we went to Spurs and that turned out alright. If nothing else, this will be another chance for the now famous Moyes defensive resilience to be tested, as well as a chance for a run out for Joe Hart which will be nice, so long as nobody shoots in that one side of the goal where he can't save anything. And here's a thing I noticed on Saturday, that gives me a little bit more confidence going in to this game than I probably should own up to - there were players laughing and smiling at Stoke, during the game. There was a confidence in the team that I can't really recall seeing for a year or two. PLayers like Cresswell and Lanzini suddenly look as though they are living their lifelong dreams once again, rather than being pressganged into a bank robbery that they really think is going to end badly.

Contrast that with Mark Hughes, a man replete with a face like he's just stung a bee.

***

It occurs to me that I never mentioned my big night out at the FSF Awards. I appreciate that not all of you waste your time on Twitter so may not know that I didn't win the Best Blogger Award, despite investing in an expensive and - I now realise - fraudulent Russian hacking scam offer. 

I would, though, like to thank all of you who voted for me either for the nominations or in the vote itself, and I am very appreciative of all the good luck messages on the night. Kieron at The Swiss Ramble won the award and is a very worthy winner. Still, one should never turn down a free meal and I did get a nice cheer in the room from the Hammers in situ. My thanks to all, it was a nice ride. 

This is not me, it's Ledley King, but I forgot to take any pictures

Stoke 0 - 0 West Ham (And Other Ramblings)

1. Still Feeling Blue

Eighteen years ago I went to see the Christopher Nolan film, "Memento". I saw it with my mum and sister and, true to form, they were a few minutes late. Now usually, missing the first five minutes of a film isn't a massive problem except for when the story is being told backwards.

For those of you who haven't seen it, the story centres around Guy Pearce, a man who has a memory span of just fifteen minutes and who is searching for the men who killed his wife. In order to aid his search he tattoos certain phrases all over his body and has a set of Polaroids with names and descriptions written on them. No one seems to tell the truth, nothing is what it seems and all in all it's a beautifully dark comic noir thriller and I recommend it highly.

I'm looking for a right back - seen one?

In that spirit, it's not difficult to imagine that somewhere, before this game, Slaven Bilic was stood looking at himself in a mirror. On his body were tattooed varying slogans like "Winning games is good" and "Players don't play well out of position". Scattered in front of him were varying Polaroids, mostly showing injured players, but there were others like one of Edmilson Fernandes saying "Don't play at wing back" or another of Jonathan Calleri saying "On loan from Argentina - nobody knows why".

Slaven used to win games of football but he can't exactly remember how. Now, he's in a seedy hotel in Stoke wondering what to do next. Diafra Sakho is tied up in his closet and he has no idea why and no ability to make any new memories. He's in Memento.

So, just as Slaven gets the full picture in his head, and decides to play all his players in their correct positions, and with a gameplan to win the game by scoring goals, suddenly his memories disappear once again.

And so it comes to pass that a midfielder plays at wing back, Jonathan Calleri is trying to score via a rabona and we end this game with a set of substitutions that could only have been devised by a person suffering from serious head trauma.

2. Cry One More Time

Perhaps the worst thing about this result is that we really could have won it. Unlike last weeks exercise in zen like non aggression, this was a reasonably decent encounter. Adrian once again showed the value of a keeper who can make important stops at important times, but the man of the match was Stoke keeper, Jack Butland, who pulled off a number of excellent saves to keep us out.

So to be critical is to be churlish, but also fairly accurate. As this season slips away like a fat kid on a water slide, it's noticeable how rarely we've been able to prevail in these sorts of games of late. Tight, tense affairs where a rare moment of quality would be enough to separate the teams have typically ended up as stalemates - think West Brom and Everton - which perhaps isn't all that surprising when you consider that most of the quality present in our team last year is currently not on the pitch.

It's not new or original for me to say this, but I sure can't wait for this season to finish.

3. Love Hurts

Whilst there's not much doubt that we could have won this game, there's also no doubt that the best chance of the game fell to Marko Arnautovic. He was found with one of those long balls that Stoke don't play anymore now that Mark Hughes is in charge and they are basically Barcelona redux, but his poked effort was brilliantly kept out by Adrian from close range.

By contrast we fashioned lots of less clear chances inside the box, the best of which fell to Calleri and gets a section all to itself later on.

Our most potent threat was Andre Ayew who was twice denied splendidly by Butland, once from a marvellous overhead kick after a fine run by Arthur Masuaku. But in the end, a point seemed about right, and it's another mile travelled on the slow boat to safety.

With this team selection I was actually a little surprised that we carried the fight as well as we did. What the above graphic doesn't show is the Catherine Wheel like display of Cheikhou Kouyate who bestrode the battlefield like a general and was a huge part of how we were able to frequently hit Stoke on the break.

Alongside him Manuel Lanzini continued his superb post Payet run of form, and between them they give me what little hope I can muster for the upcoming home games against much better teams. Out wide, I remain unconvinced that playing Fernandes as a wing back is a good idea, but there's no doubt his athleticism is a bonus, and indeed he twice popped up here in advanced positions in the first half without quite picking the final pass that was needed. I couldn't help but think back to Bournemouth and Sam Byram and wonder if playing a proper wingback in that position might actually be useful at some point.

It rather feels like we've stumbled into this 3-4-2-1 formation by accident, and that Bilic is now picking players and shoehorning them into the setup rather than picking players in their natural positions and moulding a way of playing to suit them.

And so it goes that we have a central midfielder playing out of position to cover a suspended full back, and retaining his spot seemingly because the manager doesn't like to treat his players unfairly. It's admirable enough I suppose, but I feel like we've seen this all season to the detriment of the team. Darren Randolph given too much rope, Noble playing ahead of more in form alternatives and Kouyate playing instead of Byram for reasons I've yet to fathom.

Poor decision making is one thing, but it seems to me that a failure to make decisions can be equally as damaging.

4. That's All It Took

On that topic, it's been a delight to welcome Adrian back between the sticks. I wouldn't say he necessarily inspires an unswerving confidence but there is a certain comfort to be taken when he's lining up a save. As an example, Saido Berahino hit a very decent second half effort low to his right that he palmed away strongly. It was a save he should have made, but one perhaps that Randolph might not. In addition, Berahino hadn't scored in 24 games so I'd have bet my fucking house on him doing it against us. I still remember Linvoy Primus, after all.

Whether Adrian stays with us in the long run is probably dependent upon whether the Club want to make a big splash in the summer. The reality is that the Spaniard is a perfectly decent stopper who got off to a bad start when his own form dipped just as Bilic was assembling a back four that seemed to rely upon voodoo spells and magic to keep out the opposition rather than such exotic notions as tackling or defensive structure.

But, our Board is our Board, and they like nothing more then to be seen to be doing stuff. Snodgrass, Fonte, Ayew, Zaza - one could argue that all of these were little more than impulse purchases because David Sullivan didn't want to be seen to look like he was inactive. It's not hard to see how such folly could extend to splashing out £15m on Joe Hart.

The problem I have with that is the fact that goalkeeper is the easiest position to recruit. Top teams only need one so unlike centre halves or strikers, they tend not to get hoarded. When Tom Heaton can't get a game at Manchester United he moves to Burnley. When Tim Howard can't get a game at Manchester United he moves to Everton. Stop me when you see a pattern.

Equally, Premier League history is filled with keepers who were brought from "smaller" overseas clubs for low cost. Petr Cech, Thomas Sorensen, Jussi Jaaskelainen, a raft of Americans and, yes, Adrian are all examples of outstanding players who were picked up for small sums.

Of course, it's still possible to spend big amounts on the every best keepers like De Gea or Lloris but I'd still be fine with us sticking with Adrian and spending the money elsewhere. I'm {on} not {a} sure {right} where {back}.

5. Do You Know How It Feels

It's not often you watch a game and think that a full back might be the best player on the pitch. I can think of a few vintage Leighton Baines and Ashely Cole performances, and of course we had Julian Dicks in his prime, but it's not an everyday occurrence.

Step forward then Arthur Masuaku, who was comfortably our best player here, even if he has a haircut that looks like it belongs in The Hunger Games.

The Arthur Appreciation Society

Masuaku has always looked pretty comfortable on the ball and going forward, but has had a tendency to defend like Diane Abbott on the radio. To clarify, it's often made no sense at all. But since his return to the side, and perhaps crucially - to full fitness - he has looked outstanding. His footwork makes him difficult to tackle and as such allows him to raid high up the pitch. He combined here on a number of occasions with Lanzini and Ayew, and generally seemed to have miles more time on the ball than anybody else on the pitch. 

The crucial difference to his earlier performances were that back then he wanted time but couldn't get it, whereas now he brims with the confidence to make time for himself. A year ago I would have thought it incomprehensible that we would replace Aaron Cresswell and yet the performances of Masuaku in the last couple of weeks have been better than anything Cresswell has produced this season. Small sample size and all that - who can forget that Kepa Blanco looked good for about twenty minutes - but there is an increasing confidence about his play, and he deserves a chance to press for his place. 

That said, an hour of chasing after Kyle Walker on Friday might burst that balloon fairly quickly. 

6. White Line Fever

Talking about players brimming with confidence and derring do. Jonathan Calleri. He hangs out with a couple.

Calleri continues to bemuse me like some sort of footballing "Avengers" film. Why am I watching this? Why do people think is good? OK, that bit was good. Shame about the other hour and a half.

Jonathan Calleri. Obviously.

In this game, Calleri was faced with a great chance to score after a Fernandes cross fell to his feet eight yards from goal and the keeper was stranded. Faced with the chance to touch the ball on to his left foot and try to drive it past the defender, Martins Indi, he did what any of us would do when we'd scored one deflected goal all season, had no confidence and were playing for a team in desperate need of points - he tried a Rabona. 

I have not the words. 

OK, I have some words. 

Christ on a fucking submarine. 

I can just about accept that every now and again a rabona can make sense when your feet fall in a certain position and your momentum is going a certain way. Payet and Lanzini have both credibly pulled it off at various times this season, and we all delighted in them. But Jonathan Calleri is assuredly not in that class. 

He is our Jeremy Renner, bringing a bow and arrow to a gun fight. I want him to be good, but I really don't see the point. 

7. Farther Along

Three men currently enjoying their football in the current system are our centre halves. Winston Reid was at his imperious best here, blocking everything and finding a precious moment to whinge at every single person in the stadium.

Beside him Jose Fonte is revelling in the unusual situation of having people in the team who are actually concerned with stopping the opposition scoring, whilst James Collins is the perfect man to sit between them and chuck himself on any grenades that need muffling. Perhaps the reality is that we don't have a confident enough pair, or indeed four, to play a traditional system so we're replacing defensive competence with numbers and just snuffing out attacks with the sheer weight of players in front of the goal.

Crucial to that is Havard Nordtveit who patrolled that area in front of the back three with plenty of intent, and he did a good job of preventing the likes of Shaqiri from getting between the lines and causing us problems. I'm not sure that Andy Carroll can play in this system as it doesn't get players close enough to him but even the powderpuff Calleri made it look workable at times, and for now it definitely seems like the best way to stagger to the end of the season.

8. Man In The Fog

Whisper it quietly but is Andre Ayew becoming useful?

He linked play nicely here, following up from a decent second half performance last week against a soporific Everton. Whether he is a proper striker is up for debate but we have to ask the same question of Calleri too, Slaven. Therefore, the decision to remove him and leave the Argentine on, to facilitate the introduction of Noble was a head scratcher. Having had two very decent efforts, Ayew looked positively aghast to be withdrawn and dragged himself off the pitch with all the speed of Karren Brady answering the front door to HMRC inspectors.

Yet more mystery would follow when Bilic removed Calleri and then his Magic 8 ball told him to bring on Robert Snodgrass in his stead. For those keeping track at home this meant we had no strikers on the pitch, as we employed a sturdy 5-5 formation that one would usually associate more with Roman military units than Premier League teams.

Maybe there was some unseen method to the madness, but mostly it just looked like a manager trying to get certain players some game time, and not worrying about whether that actually made sense given the situation of the game.

I'm not the biggest fan of Ashley Fletcher, feeling that he would have benefitted greatly from a loan spell somewhere, but to be left on the bench whilst the manager plays anybody but you seems like it must be demoralising, much as in the same way that Byram has suffered this year. I'm fairly open about my loss of faith in Bilic, but games like this don't help. This was an almost Redknappian set of changes that did nothing but gift the initiative back to Stoke in the closing stages, and seemed to confirm the thought that if you're a Bilic favourite you'll get playing time no matter whether it makes sense or not.

9. Dark End Of The Street

It might have made sense to have opened with the HMRC raid on West Ham and Newcastle but in the end I began to realise that I don't really have much to add. I actually work in this field, so I can confirm that 180 agents isn't a casual knockabout gig, but at the same time it's impossible to know what this is about.

I'd be willing to bet the same house that I already lose gambling on Saido Berahino to score that this was agent related, as they are the hardest people to regulate and clubs can easily fall into a trap of paying money to them that doesn't end up being declared.

But at the same time, I don't know and it could just as easily relate to irregularities around image rights, or the failure to report agents fee as a benefit in kind or even just good old fashioned evasion.

I can't really believe that the Club would be so stupid as to try and get cute with their tax affairs in an age when they've been given a taxpayer funded stadium, and get £90m from the Premier League no matter how crap they are.

But then I remember that we are the Club who signed Mascherano and dropped him for Hayden Mullins; the Club who made a semi final and then realised we'd played a cup tied player in the previous round for 30 seconds; the Club who tried to cure a players thigh strain with a hot jacket potato; the Club who beat a team 10-0 in the Cup and signed their centre half; the Club who signed a player from Oxford who then got homesick; the Club who sold Mike Marsh because his wife was homesick for the North, before he then moved to Turkey and came back to Southend; the Club who decided Andriy Shevchenko hadn't pulled up any trees on a trial and, of course, the Club who hired Avram Grant.

Perhaps that uselessness is just a part of our DNA. I don't know, but until we know more it's probably best not to worry about it.

10. In My Hour Of Darkness

It's going to be a long week. We play Spurs on Friday and given that our season finished months ago and they are sort of still in the title race, naturally Spurs fans don't care about it whilst it's our Cup Final. That's completely logical and cannot be argued.

Harry Kane. I don't know where to begin with this picture

Spurs fans are generally alright, but listening to them at the moment is fairly difficult. They finally have a team to match the opinion they've held of themselves for the last two decades, and having finished above Arsenal for the first time in Dele Alli's life they have now declared themselves the Kings of North London. Much as we are now all supposed to accept Gary Barlow as a serious musician, it's like the last twenty years never happened.

So, one way to get through the excruciating water cooler discussions of the next couple of weeks after their inevitable win is to arm yourself with this helpful Spurs bingo card. If you can get a full house in any conversation you win the prize of a commemorative Tim Sherwood DVD and gilet. I once did it in twelve minutes.

SPURS BINGO! @TheHList
GLORY	SONGS COPIED FROM OTHER TEAMS WITH SPURS PLAYERS NAMES THAT DON’T QUITE SCAN
IT WASN’T ARSON IT JUST BURNED DOWN	NET SPEND
HE’S ONE OF OUR OWN	WE DIDN’T HACK ANYONE. WE JUST HIRED THE GUY WHO HIRED THE GUY WHO DID
YOUR CUP FINAL	I HAVE LITERALLY NO RECOLLECTION OF THE CORRESPONDING FIXTURE FROM LAST YEAR
OUR PLAYERS WON’T EVER LEAVE FOR MORE MONEY	TOP OF THE TABLE IF THE SEASON HAD LASTED TWO YEARS

West Ham 1 - 1 Stoke (And Other Ramblings)

1. Analyse That

Boy, I'm glad that these two teams are no longer managed by Tony Pulis and Sam Allardyce or this game could have ended up being a right load of unwatchable dross!

2. What Just Happened

You know that a game of football has been absolutely weapons grade, Olympic class, 9.2 on the Richter Scale, Robbie-Williams-does-Sinatra godawful when the only positive thing the Club has to say about it is that nobody was arrested.

I thought it impossible - but this game was quite possibly worse than this shit

It's days like these that really make a man appreciate the difficulties of being a recovering addict. After 50 minutes of this game there wasn't a person inside the London Stadium who wasn't openly attempting to secure Class A drugs in the hope of livening up this "Matrix Revolutions" shitshow of an excuse for a football game. And in fairness, this might actually be the most cogent explanation yet for why Adrian later came charging off his line like your best mate coming up at 5am at Creamfields.

3. The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

So we have now played 6 home games this season and have averaged 2.3 shots on target per game during that span. That is less than Hull (who aren't actually professional footballers and are really a troupe of wandering minstrels), Sunderland (who only have one player capable of physically shooting) and three times less than Liverpool who have only played 4 home games.

This might not seem like a huge deal but shooting statistics correlate pretty well with team victories. If you generally take more shots on target than you allow, then over time you can expect positive results. That probably seems incredibly obvious but, as a counter example, possession based statistics don't tend to correlate anywhere near as accurately.

What's perhaps more alarming is that we actually average 16 shots altogether per game, good for 7th in the league, but we are generally about as accurate as a Daily Mail front page when we do.

It doesn't help that our forwards have been in absentia all season, but generally it speaks to the overall lack of incision we show when playing at home. With no confidence, a peculiar tactical approach and seemingly no obvious game plan for how to break teams down, we are just not creating the volume and type of clear cut chances that typified our play last year.

And to think we're doing all this after we got rid of Emmanuel Emenike.

Glenn Whelan - A bit of a looker, and has more goals for us this season than all our strikers combined

4. Heat

It's easy, I think, to lay the blame for dropped points at the feet of players who make obvious mistakes. Today it was Adrian, previously it's been {insert whoever you want here as they've all had a turn so far this season} but first you have to look at the team as a whole. And this was a woeful team performance.

The 3-4-2-1 formation has been adhering to the law of diminishing returns for a while now, and it's telling how other teams have reacted to it. Palace were flummoxed for 45 minutes and only sorted out a response after half time. Sunderland, despite being a group of performance artists, couldn't cope for 30 minutes before making a tactical adjustment that should have got them a draw, and then last week Everton had a tough 20 minutes but thereafter beat us without breaking a sweat.

The cup victory against Chelsea remains our best performance of the season, in any formation, but did come against a largely second string visiting team and had more than a whiff of Cup Magic (™) about it.

So, by now Stoke weren't likely to be surprised by our set up and duly had a game plan to match us. They essentially set up pretty deep and invited our back three to create something. This is a big problem for us as James Collins cannot pass and whenever Angelo Ogbonna goes over the halfway line he looks about as comfortable as a horse on a rope bridge.

By forcing these players to initiate attacks it meant Stoke could press quickly, and in numbers, on the likes of Lanzini and Payet, thus reducing them to a largely peripheral state for much of the first hour. With Antonio once again shunted out wide, this put the onus on Mark Noble to influence the game through the middle, but he struggled too, with Stoke playing Joe Allen in with Glenn Whelan and 46 year old Charlie Adam, and generally shutting down any space in dangerous areas.

What this also meant was that on the numerous occasions that we gave the ball away, Stoke were set up to break on us with pace. Jon Walters was the source of much of the danger and it's only the fact he's not actually very good at football that probably kept the game scoreless at half time.

5. 15 Minutes

I was quite surprised then, that Bilic didn't seem to do much in the interval to change things. The message seems to have been "Guys, things are going terribly - keep it up", and the lads stuck to their orders pretty well.

I have been praising Bilic on these pages for a while over his apparent willingness to change tactics on the fly when things aren't going well and in fairness to him his double substitution here paid immediate dividends. But I rather wish that it was our tactical systems causing the opposition to change their approach rather then the other way round. If 3-4-1-2 is only going to work against bottom of the table teams then so be it, find another way of playing against better opposition.

At present I can't help but be reminded of when we went to Spurs in 2013 and won 3-0 playing with a "false 9" and generally catching them totally unawares. Characteristically, Sam Allardyce was so delighted with this that he persevered with it for a further five games, despite not winning any of them, before eventually conceding that other teams had now adjusted to deal with the system.

Teams work you out in the Premier League, and once the element of surprise has gone you have to be left with players who are comfortable in the system. 3-4-3 (or our variant) relies heavily on confident, ball playing defenders to get things moving. I was fortunate enough to watch Antonio Conte's Italy side play this system to perfection in their 2-0 win over Spain at Euro 2016 at the Stade de France. However, the reality of that performance was that they had Chiellini, Bonucci and Barzagli to make it work from the back. We have James Collins. It might be time for a change there Slav.

Not Giorgio Chiellini - but has also scored more goals than all our strikers combined

6. The King Of Comedy

I enjoyed Mark Hughes's assertion that his team couldn't play good football today because the pitch was slow. I don't even really know what that means, but I always like it when passive aggressive football managers come up with imaginary reasons for their teams not to have played well.

I don't know about you, but whenever I see a team sheet with Ryan Shawcross, Glenn Whelan, 59 year old Charlie Adam and Jon Walters on it my immediate thought is always "Shit, I hope that pitch is slow so those boys can't get their free flowing passing game going".

A slow pitch (whatever that is), is also presumably helpful to us as it lets us hit it long to our big physical front three of Payet, Lanzini and Ayew.

7. Mad Dog And Glory

Imagine our surprise then, when Stoke ended up scoring from a long ball despite being the free flowing, slick passing second coming of the 1994 AC Milan side.

76 year old Charlie Adam lobbed one over the top for Jon Walters, who was just about to look up and consider a cross when he caught sight of a ketamine fuelled Adrian sprinting off his line yelling all the words to "Born Slippy" and sporting a leather bracelet on his wrist that you can only buy on a beach in Ibiza.

Adrian and Ogbonna consider whether to tackle Jon Walters

Walters hoofed it in the general direction of the goal before Adrian caught him with a neck high kung fu kick all whilst yelling "lager, lager, lager, lager - going back to Romford, mega mega white thing". It was only then that we noticed the strobe light affixed to the crossbar and the mixing deck behind the goal, but it was too late as Bojan had already turned it in and two more precious points went down the drain. 

As is customary when a keeper makes an error, there has been a bit of clamour for Adrian to be dropped for Darren Randolph. Personally, I'd be inclined to resist as I think Adrian has been good enough for a while now to merit some leeway, but I wouldn't be heartbroken either way. 

Don't forget though, that it was only last week that we were purring over his brilliant save from uber-Scouser Ross Barkley to keep it scoreless at Goodison Park, and I'm going to discount much of the early part of the season as we played most of that without a defence.

If changes are going to come at White Hart Lane, I'd rather include Reece Oxford in place of Kouyate in the back three, and push the latter into midfield to replace the suspended Noble. If we're going to persist with three at the back, then someone has to be able to get hold of the ball and do something with it other than just rifle it 40 yards towards poor Andre Ayew. 

8. Killer Elite

I believe it was William Shakespeare who said "Buy poorly in summer, Often Autumn's a bummer", which I suspect was written when his local team bought a load of dross in July and then had to go bananas in January to try and recover. 

There isn't a huge amount to be gained revisiting our disastrous summer transfer window once again, but suffice to say I'm pretty sure that Andre Ayew wasn't purchased to play in a position so far in front of his colleagues that he could more accurately be described as an "advanced scout" than as a centre forward. 

I still maintain that bringing Sakho back into the team would make a huge difference as it would allow us to play the 4-2-3-1 from last year, with Antonio wide right, Payet wide left and either Ayew or Lanzini just behind. But of course this falls over completely because we don't have a single solitary fit right back at the Club, and are reduced to playing midfielders and wingers there. What's particularly weird is that we bought the very highly rated Sofiane Feghouli to the Club and then promptly forgot about him, to the extent that he hasn't started a league game yet, and never will while we play this system.

I never thought I'd miss Carl Jenkinson quite so much. 

9. Grudge Match

So, after the international break, it's off to Spurs we go as we finally embark upon the horror run of fixtures that has been looming for quite some time, like an iceberg over our Cockney Titanic. 

By the time we've finished up playing Spurs (a), Man Utd (a), Arsenal (h) and Liverpool (a) there is every chance that we will be firmly ensconced in the bottom four, and Payet will be flirting even more shamelessly with Paris Saint Germain than he already is now. 

It's also been a long standing tradition for all of our players to get injured right before we play Spurs away, so there is that to consider aswell, however I doubt that two rounds of international fixtures and loads of long distance travelling will cause any problems to our crack medical squad.

I'm beginning to feel like maybe this edition of The H List is being a bit too pessimistic. After all, we have a lovely new stadium that is working out just brilliantly, especially since the board decided to continue their phenomenally successful public relations campaign by introducing squads of Death Eaters to roam the stadium Avada Kedava'ring any season ticket holders daring to stand up at any point.

So I thought I'd check in and see how this season is comparing to previous disastrous league campaigns, so I can reassure myself that everything is going to be fine. Here they are through the first 11 games:

LWLLLLDWWLD - Slaven Bilic 2016/17 (11 points)

LLLLDWDDLLD - Avram Grant 2010/11 (7 points)

WDLDLLLLLWW - Alan Pardew 2006/07 (11 points)

via GIPHY

10. American Hustle

One thing that you may have seen this week is that the Chicago Cubs won baseball's World Series for the first time in 108 years. In the interests of full disclosure, I am a Cleveland Indians fan - the beaten team - and thus am not terribly well disposed towards the Chicagoans even though I can begrudgingly say that it's a nice story for their fans.

For those who don't know, Cleveland took a 3-1 lead before losing in a decisive Game 7, meaning I got to experience Cardiff 2006 all over again except that this time it was at 5am and I had to get up and go to work two hours later where absolutely nobody gave a shit that my team had lost.

What's interesting about this win though, and why we should care about this as football fans, is that the Cubs are a heavily analytics led ball club. For those who don't really know what this means, using analytics is a way to move past traditional methods of scouting and player evaluation and instead rely very heavily on analysis of statistics and player profiling, to complement traditional scouting and player development.

This has become a narrative in the US about the Cubs win, but what's especially odd about that is that the Indians are probably even further down this track but they simply have far less money. So much so that the difference in their annual payroll versus the Cubs was $88m. Yes, that's EIGHTY EIGHT MILLION dollars. And the Indians still came within one run of winning the whole thing. So it does give me hope that a smarter team can go toe to toe with richer teams if they have the right people in place to do so.

As regular readers will know, I am big into analytics (but not clever enough to understand it properly) but why people over here should start to care about this is because in five years time, every Premier League team will be knee deep in this stuff. And I am pretty concerned that West Ham will be left behind.

You may disagree, because the UK media still largely consists of ex-players parroting long held sayings like "He's got to score there", as a player misses a chance that is only ever scored 21% of the time. Eventually this will pass and you will see more and more people with no playing background making key decisions at clubs because they understand the data that the club holds far better than the guy who played left wing for them in 1979.

As I wrote here, the structure at West Ham is opaque, with our Head of Analysis, Rory Campbell, our Head of Recruitment, Tony Henry, chairman David Sullivan and Slaven Bilic all seemingly having input into transfer policy.

Meanwhile, Liverpool have announced the promotion of Michael Edwards to the position of Sporting Director. This moves them ever closer to the General Manager/Manager structure of US sports where the manager is provided with a playing staff and he prepares them for games and all personnel decisions are made by a separate team under the remit of the General Manager. It's no surprise that Liverpool are owned by FSG, the same group who own the Boston Red Sox, and who are a heavily analytics influenced group themselves.

Why raise this? Because we absolutely do not need teams like Liverpool getting smarter. They already have huge financial advantages over us. So too do Man Utd and Chelsea and Arsenal and Spurs, but by and large those teams haven't needed to be smarter as they can simply outspend their mistakes. No one, for instance, could accuse anybody at Man Utd of overthinking anything they've done for the last three years.

But Leicester changed all of that. Now the big teams want some bang for their buck, as they realise that their decades long dominance can be challenged by clever scouting, good coaching and, let's face it, massive amounts of luck.

Liverpool, for example, have finally cottoned on to the idea of taking some risks in the transfer market so they can buy players for £5m instead of letting them move to Southampton and paying £30m for them two years later.

I don't know about you, but I'm still fairly concerned that the extent of our scouting network is whichever agent happens to be sitting in the Directors Box with David Sullivan that day. Ever wonder why we have a punt on a South American striker every year? It's Sullivan's weakness, and the sign that he still holds the final say on who comes into and out of the Club. No matter what happens this year, until we change that structure and put a proper team in place to manage the football side of things, we're always going to run the risk of having a summer like the one we've just had.