The future of West Ham fitness coach Miljenko Rak is again coming under the microscope following the team’s collapse after half an hour of last night’s game against Manchester City.
Some have suggested that the team threw in the towel but the talk inside the club this morning is again over the role of the the 69 year old.
Worries over the training and fitness regime have been ongoing this season as the team has thrown away leads or faded after looking on the case for the early part of the game.
Rak’s methods are under scrutiny with questions being asked about the former Croatian Olympic handball coach’s role given the regular collapses.
One source told us: “We are not defending as a team. When we had the ball we were surrounded by three players but when they were in possession we had one player trying to shut things down.
In most games we are decent for 25/30 minutes, our fitness is worrying and something that needs to be looked at.”
Was our 3rd game in six days !!
The fitness level and injury recovery time has been a constant concern for the club for a long time now . It seems to be raising the question of commitment and willingness to fight .
Players are paid far too much for a weeks work in Sport ; not like the rest of us who go out and cut our knuckles white in all weather to earn a crust . There are a lot of lads who go out and play football for Thier local pub on a Sunday and still turn up for work on the Monday.
I did for years and loved it .. knocks and bruises and nicks and cuts included .
Ok , we were never at the professional level ( ametuaur neither , but , our commitment was total . ) even played three games a week at times .
If a Professional Club can’t get it sorted then something is definitely wrong and someone or some people are taking the micheal . Players are paid too much to be poofs .
I dont think you use the term poof in this day & age Kevin lmao
That’s how it was back then ; see no reason to change the expression now . It’s an expression that served in the days before politacal correctness .
3 games in 6 days of which one was played almost entirely with 10 men. To then come up against aguero, silva, de brybe and Sterling? I’m not surprised we got thumped.
Political correctness is fine within reason Kevin. It is just about treating people right. Imagine you had a son & he told you he was gay. Would you call him a ****? And if he told you he was going to support West Ham you would not say he was a deluded cockney ****. You would say he had delusion issues around West Ham…or something.
The fitness has been an issue right from the start of preseason, you watch the team warming up there is zero intensity, zero focus players going through the motions not players ready to go into a war which most games are, the modern game is about grinding teams down, literally survival of the fittest, you have to have 1 2 or 3 men in the faces of your opponent like city do, like Liverpool do and like Chelsea do, you need to train that into the players then when you have the ball its what you do with it that also has to be trained and also means at least 3 people will be linked at all time one man has the ball 1 or more will make themselves available for the pass and the third man is running to receive the pass from the second man. The harder you work in training the better you get, you only need 1 touch football if you always know roughly where your team mates are going to be running, the same should happen in defence you should always clear to a zone where one of your team should be anticipating the ball, thats why the best teams always seem to win the ball back, not because they are particularly better than their opponents but because they train with the purpose and intensity that during the games they can call on all that experience. We don’t seem to do that because most games it looks like a bunch of strangers on the field always two and three touch ponderous football, it is at best going to provide a mid table finish which is something we shouldn’t be accepting. Yes we are West Ham but that group of players is very talented, they could play the Guardiola way or the Chelsea way they have the skills to do it but they are not coming close and without accurate passing and no high press, that pitch at the OS is too wide for them just makes it easier for better teams to carve us open, there is no shame to losing to a Guardiola team 5 0 they were brilliant to watch after they went 1 0 up, for me its not about yesterdays result its about nearly every performance this season. I feel sorry for Slav he is a good man but he has the chance to make changes and much like Allardyce he seems unwilling to evolve and when we come under pressure that team doesn’t look like it has the training instilled that means they can fall back on their experience under pressure.