There is a passage in one of Sir Alex Ferguson’s latest books that seems deliberately designed to chop West Ham down to size and no doubt, as intended, would have pricked a few egos in the way he does better than anyone. What, Ferguson wanted to know, was “the West Ham way” and why did the club persist in applying this label when in all his years at Manchester United he had never come against a team from Upton Park that he was afraid of. West Ham, he pointed out, had not won a trophy since 1980 and always seemed to be surviving, or lucky as hell, when they visited Old Trafford. So what was this West Ham way? “I hope,” Ferguson wrote, “that before I die someone can explain.”
Ferguson often confused his pen for a bayonet but there was an agenda with this one bearing in mind it was part of a long defence of Sam Allardyce, one of the managers who flock around his feet, and I suspect he probably knows, deep down, that West Ham, however much they labour the point sometimes, do have a tradition of playing football in a certain fashion.
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