No credit where it is due for West Ham

We should all be used to it by now. The fact that we are somehow invisible or that we are trapped in some sort of stereotypical world that has been created over decades.

Our bubbles are always fading and dying, someone mentions pie and mash, then we are overachievers or the Academy of Football tag gets dragged out, dusted down and ridiculed. And heaven forbid the West Ham way gets a mention.

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And when we do something well it’s because our opponents have had an off-day. And we are always last on Match of the Day. That’s how we are perceived, it seems.

Credit where credit is due? Naah, not for West Ham, that doesn’t fit into the narrative. Even when we sign a decent new player, the story the following day is all from his former club mates and how pleased they are for him.

Jesse Lingard has a blinding debut and it is the tweets of Marcus Rashford, Harry Maguire and Bruno Fernandes that are more important.

Its all about perception, isn’t it? Liverpool score a stunning end-to-end goal directly from our failed corner and it’s world class. We break as quickly at Villa Park and Michail Antonio sets up Lingard and that’s a defensive mistake.

Jack Grealish creates Villa’s goal with a clever pass to Ollie Watkins and that gets dissected and re-run on TV as genius. Said Benrahma’s outstanding through ball for Tomas Soucek’s opener against Villa barely gets a mention.

Ah Grealish, the new darling of the media. His assist for Watkins' goal is lauded. About the only moment in the match that he escaped Vlad the Impaler. Antonio creates two goals, one with a sublime cross-box pass to Lingard, having earlier set-up Soucek for his eighth goal of the season and all that gets pretty much overlooked.

You see, we are just well organised, fit, committed, bullies and a team full of ‘big’ players. In fact friends are now almost betting on the first time Marouane Fellaini gets mentioned in comparison to Soucek. I am rather pleased now I compared our amazing Czech with Martin Peters last week.

And guess what? We were damned with faint praise by being told we were all about a high press. When Liverpool do it, and that was a key element of how they won the title, it is all down to that wonder coach Jurgen Klopp.

And David Moyes? Well it’s always about his functional, grafting Everton that we are emulating. Nothing about the clever, quick passing, intricate midfield that Benrahma, Lingard, Rice and Soucek, plus Aaron Cresswell, performed.

BT’s talking heads were just full of it, weren’t they? I have no idea who those pundits were that they produced for the Villa game. I doubt any of them had ever been in a Premier League dressing room, training ground or had any idea what it is like at that level. And frankly that’s what I want from pundits, the ability to tell me stuff that has some validity.


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All they wanted to do was gush about Grealish and at half time we were told that Villa had ‘shaded’ it. Good grief, what were they watching? At the end we had 20 shots, for an away team. Ten on target. Villa had just two, but somehow it was still all about Grealish and our defence and how Villa had an off night.

Again it was all about our high press. Stopped Villa playing, didn’t it, as if it was some sort of underhand trick. Liverpool were told their press was hugely impressive on Sunday, and it was. So that’s OK.

Match of the Day were no better. Danny Murphy called Lingard a “big fish in a small pool.” How insulting to our side. That’s opposed, I suggest, to Murphy being a small fish in a big Liverpool, where he was lucky to have Steven Gerrard alongside him.

BBC’s website reckoned Coufal 'got the better of Grealish'. I think it was a bit more than that, he destroyed him (with Ryan Fredericks' help, of course). That moment when Coufal ‘had a word’ with the Villa captain, it scared the life out of him.

Then when he had stopped him in his tracks for the upteenth time, he stalked him from one side of the pitch to the other, stopping the England midfielder from ever being able to turn towards goal. It was like someone trying to shake off a persistent wasp, and failing. It was little short of terrorism, and lovely to watch.

Now we should not be bothered by all this now, it’s always like this. But we are, aren’t we? It is annoying and devalues what we are achieving.

These 38 points from 22 games is the highest we have managed since the boys of ’86 finished third. They had 45 points at this point, so we have a little more to do yet to emulate that. But is clearly coming.

We are more than just a functional, lucky side to be playing in a pandemic when everyone else is suffering. You mean these big clubs with vastly bigger squads. Us and Villa have used less players this season than anyone else, but we are fifth on merit.

Moyes, too, gets faint praise. He gets half-hearted praise for putting two men on Grealish, having described the lad as the best player in the Premier League this season. And then reduced him almost to tears. The jokes about Coufal’s display have been endless.


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That he followed him into the Villa dressing room, that he was in the backseat of his car on the way home or sitting at the breakfast table with him the following morning. I'm not sure Grealish will ever recover.

And after a week that started with the inquest over a poor, uncertain display against Liverpool where we looked far too respectful and then included the uproar over not signing a replacement for Seb Haller in the window, all is forgiven with our seventh win in eight games.

Moyes’ suggestion that Lingard could cover as a striker for Antonio was treated with ridicule. When you only have a certain amount of money to spend, and I take with some considerable salt the ‘you have £25m to spend’ stuff, it is a stroke of genius to come up with an England international who came play in six positions ahead of the back line.

And one who costs a shade over £3m until the end of the season, when we could - should even - qualify for Europe. For the record, Lingard’s debut double was only the second by a West Ham player in the Premier League since Trevor Sinclair’s against Everton in January 1998.

In the end this result, this run of form this season, has done so much for the state of mind of our fans. The pandemic has hit different generations in different ways. Me and the missus have hardly seen our granddaughters in almost a year, our lives have been reduced to click and collect and a daily walk.

Football has kept me from even more booze. The sheer joy of seeing us play this well and be at the other end of the table, has been a major boost to a very pedestrian lifestyle at present. Escapism.

I wonder if any more of our fans just felt a sense of gratitude at the end of the Villa game, a match me and the lad would have been at in normal times?

A sense of gratitude like this from a West Ham fan called Joe, on Twitter: “The things football can do for your mental health is absolutely unreal. I speak on behalf of a lot of people in saying it’s all I have to look forward to at the moment. The beautiful game.”



Gratitude and thanks to our manager and team for giving us so much to enjoy. To them it is a job, and they are carrying it out in difficult circumstances better than any of us felt possible. They say if you play for the badge on the front of the shirt, we will always remember the name on the back.

Never a truer word spoken. This may well be the season where we never have the chance to see the team - apart from the 2,000 who were allowed in for the Manchester United home game that is. But there will be a link, a connection, for us all. You can see they know who they are playing for, and it won’t be forgotten.

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