Michail Antonio is not an out and out striker – he’s at his best wide but his performances over the last two games have shown him to be perhaps the Hammers bargain buy of the last few years.
Yes I know inflation has hit the game over five years but the £7 million we paid Nottingham Forest on deadline day 2015 seems incredible in retrospect.
He has shown again against Chelsea and Newcastle just what an important player he is to this club as he starts to find the back of the net and produce performances to die for.
And like the rest of us he is thrilled with the level of form being shown by our to most recent signings jarrod Bowen and loanee Tomas Soucek who are quickly becoming a Hammers big two.
In real terms – should Soucek become permanent – they will probably be seen in the same sort of financial terms as Michail – top players at very reasonable fees.
Talking after the Newcastle game at https://www.whufc.com/news/articles/2020/july/06-july/michail-antonio-were-scoring-goals-again-now-we-need-stop-conceding he said:
“Now we’ve shown that we can score goals, we need to start doing better at the back and we’ll start winning games.
“That’s another assist for Jarrod and another goal for Tomas, so they’re definitely looking good, they’re looking sharp and they’re definitely adding to our squad, which is a quality squad.
“This season I don’t feel I’ve got enough goals, so it’s definitely good that I’ve got two in the last two games and hopefully I can keep that going until the end of the season.”
Pic courtesy www.whufc.com
Antonio had mixed feelings about the result, having twice seen his team relinquish the lead and again fail to close out a game in which they held a winning position.
“The positive is that we got a point from the game, but the negative is that we feel we’ve dropped two points,” he admitted. “When we keep dropping points after taking the lead, we need to be more resilient.
“We need to try to keep the leads in the games because we’ve done it too many times this season. Now we’ve managed to show our attacking form and we are scoring goals, we need to shore up our back as well.
“We’re definitely a little bit disappointed because we feel like we’ve dropped two points because we created a lot of chances, but the positives are we got a point, we’re four points clear of the bottom three, three points clear of Watford and the games coming up give us a good opportunity to pull away.”
He believes six points are achievable this week against Burnley and Norwich adding: “The mindset for our next few games is that we want three points from each of them and that’s what we believe we can get.”
Someone needs to tell Cresswell that his job is to stop crosses, Wolves targeted him, Newcastle targeted him, as do others. He just doesn’t get out to the attackers.
The reason that Fornals was so deep on their second is because he has to cover so much ground for Cresswell, and he was missing for the first goal again. Average players can put the work in and stop crosses and he doesn’t.
Just another comment (I must), the players keep saying they have such a talented squad, I think they must be watching someone else. We have a good 8-9 players on their day, the rest are bang average.
The first goal is down to lanzini getting drawn into the centre and leaving cresswell covering two men. When Maxim gets the ball ,cresswell is forced inside to cover him, leaving the overlapping fullback free.
That’s not cresswell fault.
The second goal yes fornals did great tracking back the try and stop the first cross, however is it cresswell fault that fornals then remain 5- 10 yards behind everyone else???