Out with the old and in with the nearly new: David Moyes is back at West Ham | Jonathan Liew

Dec 31, 2019

Less than two years after his brand of pragmatic survival was deemed not what they wanted the club have had second thoughts

Well, I’m sorry to say again: it’s Moysey. In many ways the West Ham to which David Moyes returns this week is largely similar to the one he left 19 months ago: riven by discord, scarred by multiple defeats, lacking not just an identity but the most basic idea of what that identity might be. If Moyes was the answer, and then Manuel Pellegrini, and then Moyes again after him, then what on earth was the question?

Moyes has signed an 18-month contract. It is the gloomiest of all contract lengths: a Sherwood‑at‑Tottenham contract, an Allardyce‑at‑Everton contract: a transparently unsatisfying compromise between sporting artifice and financial pragmatism. It is a contract that says we’d all like this to work out but, come on, let’s be real. And to Moyes’s credit he perfectly captured this insoluble paradox in the first interview of his second spell.

Tags: David Moyes Football Manuel Pellegrini Sport West Ham United