Slaven Bilic’s future as West Ham boss again looks to be very much under scrutiny following the horrible defeat by Manchester City.
The board has gone public in revealing it’s confusion over our form with David Sullivan declaring in his “From the Boardroom ” column: “We haven’t lost any key or influential players since last season, which was one to remember, so we are all currently struggling to understand why the team is under-performing at this moment in time.”
And in describing his attitude towards the next two games the joint chairman shows how the pressure is building adding: “We know we have to improve quickly, and upcoming fixtures against Crystal Palace and Middlesbrough now become cup finals.
He adds: “Manchester City may be an excellent attacking side, but we allowed them to carve us open time and time again, which was very disappointing. We simply have to concede that last night’s performance was just not good enough.
Although it’s hard to take any positives out of the game, for 25 minutes, until we conceded what many experts thought was a marginal penalty, we were holding our own.
Furthermore, at 1-0 down we had what seemed a simple tap-in to equalise, but the performance after that, and the result, was simply not good enough.”
He concludes: “As we showed over Christmas, though, a string of good results can move you up the Premier League table very quickly, and I am confident we will be heading in that direction over the coming weeks.
“We have seen performances improve recently, even in defeat at Leicester City and against Manchester United, so I truly believe we can continue to progress if we all push in the same direction.
It’s another London derby next weekend against Crystal Palace, which brings back memories of our 1-0 win in the reverse fixture at Selhurst Park, where we began to turn our season around earlier in the campaign.
We will also welcome back our former manager Sam Allardyce, in what will be an exciting encounter for many reasons.”
I think we’ll all agree that it’s not rocket science. Ask any West Ham fan at the end of last season what we needed: a quality striker and a quality right back (and possibly reinforcing midfield). Instead they try and do it on the cheap and that’s how we’ve ended up here. This combined with a lack of passion from almost everyone bar Reid means in a season where we could have really kicked on and progressed as a club, we’ve actually gone backwards….
It’s obvious, we lack strength in depth and we lack quality. We lost Tomkins, Valencia, Song and Moses from the Squad and didn’t replace it with anything. We have no right-back, we’re playing Kouyate and Antonio, possibly our most athletic players, out of position and not using their strengths. We’ve got no attack, a weak midfield, a dodgy defence and a half-decent keeper.
Bilic himself is like a ‘rabbit caught in the headlights’ and doesn’t appear to be up to it!
Apart from that…
even against Hull & Burnley we were lucky, any half decent team are capable of ripping us a new one. I can’t believe how quickly we have gone backwards. Practically every player we signed in the summer have not been anywhere near good enough for the PL, the club have wasted £m’s on second rate loan players & Ayew.
This transfer window is massive if we want to get something out of this season or the only thing we’ll get is a relegation dog-fight.
Not realising that the new ground had a bigger pitch and that 2 of our players aka China Doll and Captain Slow have got the pace of a broken stanna stairlift 🙂
We wont get dragged into the relegation battle.The bottom three clubs have picked up 15 pts or less in 20 matches.There is no way we wont pick up enough points to not stay out of it.
Watford are my contenders to drop like a stone.
We need to regroup in the summer & put this season down to experience.
And i must stop reading so many sites & using twitter as a new years resolution.There is no escape from some of our fans they are every where.The same ones giving their expert opinions.They are going to give me a nervous breakdown.
Whoever conducted and decided this seasons transfers is to blame so I presume Dumb & Dumber should now concentrate on providing the funds and leave the playing staff to someone who has some clue. It was obvious last season we needed a striker, right back, and a box to box fast midfielder. With what Slav was given as replacements was just cheap and not very cheerful , if he wants to freshen team up he can’t because the backups are so poor. I also believe there are dressing room problems, probably over money and a lack of a real leader on the pitch. It’s seems when things go wrong the players appear clueless because the team need a leader. Reid is the only player who has rolled up his sleeves and tried 100%, unlike our 1 trick freekicking pony. Why does Carroll spend more time in his own box than the opposition box.
Perhaps it’s time to clear out and start again without the prima dona’s.
Some very naive comments from the owner. They just thought the same players from last year would just basically step up again. Everyone knows every season you need to improve the starting XI. Other teams did better in the window and are now ahead of us again. Everyone knows that outside the top 6/7 anyone can get relegated.
They shouldn’t have put payet on such a pedestal after one good season. Other ‘legends’ had performed for years for the same status and now we feel we can’t get ride of him. Look at what Southampton do, if a player wants out you cash in and rebuild and make the club stronger as a ruthless hungry machine.
We all know we missed a trick by not signing a good CF and RB but I have no idea why we didn’t seriously look to improve CM with noble getting older and not going for Song.
They have been in the game for years yet seem to make terrible basic errors. We have a big six months ahead of us, massive even. They can’t f**k this up
I agree they were naive and apart from the Spuds and Manure away (league), two of of better performances we have not been able to field our strongest lineup from last season.Disagree about Song, a talented player but much too casual when selected in his second season.
Other teams upgraded while we trod water, though Fernandez has been a find and a couple of others may still come good.
I believe Bilic puts on a show of bravado in the media but deep down he must be seething about the summer dealings.
I still remember his remark after the summer was going pear & he said he told the board if we want to go big game fishing go big or go early.Well they didnt.
Oh & narrow the bloody pitch,passing teams like Arsenal,City love the wide open spaces.The best players say they love playing at Wembley because of the acres of space they get.We are giving these teams their very own Wembley everytime they come to us.
Ranting over,my one for the day..
Sullivan is correct – We haven’t lost any key or influential players since last season. We should be playing ok despite the terrible summer signings. Everyone at the club have become complacent especially the manager and players. An example, if true of course, was Carroll being allowed to leave a training camp hotel the night before a match to go home to put his child to bed. Can you imagine a Man Utd player asking Fergie if he could do that? This complacency happened before at West Ham – Pardew and the baby Bentley boys. We all know how that ended – everyone involved left!