The transformation of one of West Ham’s longest serving players from infrequent first team occasional to nailed-on starter will be thrown into sharp focus this weekend as the Hammers start only their third game of the season without him.
Dinos Mavropanos‘ injury – whilst not as severe as first feared- will mean that Nuno has to conjure up both a defensive replacement for the Greek within the Irons’ back line and create an alternative attacking threat from set pieces to match his towering presence in the Championship.
Netting five times already means Mavropanos has outscored West Ham’s trio of strikers and already notched more goals in this season’s eleven Championship games than in the whole of his previous West Ham career.
As Roshane Thomas writes in today’s NY Times, Dinos’ adaptation to the second division has been a major bonus for Nuno’s side:
“He’s very aggressive in the air and with respect to players in the Championship, Dinos is just bullying people who try to mark him,” Gus Poyet, Mavropanos’s manager with the Greek national team from 2022 to 2024, tells The Athletic.
In fine form for both club and country, Mavropanos is set to miss only his third West Ham game of the season
“The difficulty for most of the players is to accept that they are in the Championship, but Dinos has adapted well and is one of Nuno’s best players. Dinos remains a Greece international, so he will be aware he has to play to a high standard to remain with the national team. He took a lot of responsibility when he played under me, and he’s now a leader for West Ham.
“I would visit him a lot and we spoke about areas of his game he could improve. I would compare it to [centre-back] Lewis Dunk, who I worked with at Brighton. I told him a lot he needed to score more goals from set pieces, and then he became dominant in the air. I am seeing that now with Dinos…..
“Now that the centre-back has grown into a reliable figure in the team, it is worth remembering he was once labelled ‘Mavropanic’, because of his error-prone playing style”
Which makes his absence tomorrow against visitors West Bromwich Albion problematic. Not many fans will know that Mavropanos actually started out his football as a young lad playing as a striker – which makes you wonder how, prior to this season’s purple patch, he’d only scored four times since arriving in east London in 2022.
West Ham are fortunate that, just in the nick of time, Tomas Soucek’s return to both fitness and goal scoring ways gives options whilst the Greek is recovering.
Soucek’s commanding presence in the ‘box on set pieces will hopefully give the Irons the threat from corners and free kicks which they’ll lack whilst Mavropanos is sidelined. As C and H wrote yesterday, the defender’s absence gives Nuno a selection dilemma as the Czech probably wasn’t in Nuno’s ideal starting eleven – prior to Mav’s injury.
But the way in which the so-called ‘strikers’ are playing at the moment may well demand Soucek – owing to his goal threat alone- has a role to play.