Bees’ Swarm I An ‘Embarrassing’ Lack of Learning

West Ham failed to learn from their classroom session and conceded a scrappy goal within thirty-something seconds against Brentford yesterday, which rocked them back on their heels. The last thing the coach, the team or we as onlookers needed after conceding eight goals in the previous week.

Konstantinos Mavropanos referred to it earlier in the week, something I laughably wrote as  ‘reassuring confirmation’ of the pre-match preparation for the Brentford game, when he said to whufc.com: “I watched their [Brentford’s] game against Tottenham, and we are going to analyse that game. We have to be ready”.

The Hammers knew perfectly well what lay in store at the start of the game with Brentford’s trademark ‘Swarm’ from the kick-off.

Tomas Soucek, who scored our equaliser, spared Lopetegui’s blushes and halted further vitriol heading the coach’s way – at least for now- spoke to whufc.com last night and was frank in his own assessment:” We have to be embarrassed for that goal: it was very frustrating to concede so early, but then we saw lots of passion and adrenalin and we got the reward.”

It is just the latest in a series of slow starts for West Ham. Whether we need to make tactical adaptations and be less adventurous for the first ten minutes, if such a thing were possible, or whether we need a vice-captain who starts every game and yells at his defenders to switch on as opposed to Aaron Cresswell sitting unused on the bench- who knows.

It is part of the downside of having a captain who is a forward. No question though, a leader at the back needs to emerge to stop this trend of conceding early on which destroys all of Lopetegui’s carefully laid plans and from which the team takes about twenty minutes to recover and start to pass the ball around.

Probably this is the result of playing three ‘new’ defenders who all arrived in the summer. In how many more games will we give our opponents a head-start, before the focus is there from the first whistle? It’s getting concerning now.