The Hammers have struggled in the league but would they really ditch a manager who has taken them to a first European final since 1976?The message coming out of West Ham at the start of the week was there would be no decision on David Moyes’s future until the end of the season. Yet by the time Pablo Fornals was beating two AZ Alkmaar defenders and running through to score in the 94th minute at the AFAS Stadion on Thursday night, it seemed absurd that anyone could possibly want to replace Moyes.They were all off the bench when Fornals drove his low shot into the net, their reward for not treating the Europa Conference League as an inconvenience being a...
For all the bruises along the way Tottenham’s season is still very much alive on three fronts with the Kane-Son synergy crucialDon’t mess with the formula. With 71 minutes gone at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the first 45 of them a haze of empty content and trapped energy, Harry Kane bumped Angelo Ogbonna away with his back to the West Ham goal, flexing his glutes, aware of the beeping, flashing light on his internal radar. Behind him Son Heung-min had already begun to sprint.Son knew, even before that surge of static had begun to crackle around the stands. We have seen this picture before. The pass from Kane was instant, fizzed with a kind of celebratory excitement. Son flexed his...
A shift to exotic signings suggests a loss of direction for a club that have become once again a pit of grumblesIndividually, none of West Ham’s first three Premier League games of the season have been that bad. They were extremely unfortunate to lose at Nottingham Forest, there’s little shame in losing to Manchester City, and Brighton can be awkward opponents for any side, but especially West Ham, who now haven’t beaten them in 11 attempts. All together, though, these three defeats with no goals scored have West Ham bottom of the table. Sunday’s meeting with a struggling Aston Villa comes with a distinct sense of pressure.There were boos at full time at the London Stadium last Sunday. They were...
Ride to Europa League semi-finals has been a joy for fans but club must now decide if it wants more or just treads waterThe clock was ticking. Eintracht Frankfurt, two goals up on aggregate, looked comfortable but not impregnable. And even with 10 men, West Ham were enjoying plenty of possession and had four substitutes left to deploy. And so, with a European final at stake and the climax approaching, the world eagerly awaited David Moyes’s next move.As it turned out, Moyes’s next move was to attack a ball boy and get himself sent off. So close. The margins in this game, and all that. And although this tie was probably already gone by the time he was slinking down...
West Ham are well organised, resilient and incisive, and even the London Stadium now feels like a football groundAs Pablo Fornals ran on to Jarrod Bowen’s through-ball midway through the second half, the London Stadium fell into one of those pregnant silences that were probably the greatest loss of the time without fans. Over the course of what can only have been two or three seconds but felt far longer, you could almost hear the thought processes. First, was he going to get his shot in? Yes. Then, was he set to measure his finish? He was. Then, was his shot going to beat Alisson? It did, just about, carrying on into the net despite a hefty touch by the...