Michail Antonio has represented the heart and soul of what it means to be a Hammer over the last two …the man has been relentless in his determination to change games.

In an age when £40 million plus is considered normal for a half decent player Antonio’s £7 million fee four years ago remains  an extraordinary piece of business.

He has had more than his share of injuries yet he keeps bouncing back and showing the sort of form that us Hammers insist is the norm – he leaves absolutely nothing on the pitch.

Making comparisons is dangerous but it’s easy to understand why the manager went with his  movement, trickery and ability rather than the more static style of Haller on Saturday.

It would be truly exciting if the manager were to play the two of them together but in the meantime – despite, like some of the others he has been feeling the pressure of Saturday, fingers crossed he will be out there at Molineux on Wednesday evening.

And speaking @ https://www.whufc.com/news/articles/2019/december/01-december/antonio-we-battled-and-we-created-chances-chelsea the No 10 said following the Chelsea victory: “I’m ecstatic. You could see from the start that we had the fight, we had a plan and we stuck to it.

“The plan was to disrupt them, to let them have the ball but not come through the middle of us because we know how they always like to come inside.

So, we kind of showed them outside and got them to cross the ball because we know that with Angelo and Fabian at the back, they’re going to eat up the crosses that come in.

“They didn’t really get in between us at all, so the game plan worked. We were fighting, we were running, creating chances, making moves in behind them – we were playing good football.”

Antonio now shifts his focus to Wednesday’s trip to Wolverhampton Wanderers, urging his team to take confidence from their Stamford Bridge display.

He continued: “It takes that one thing to work out for us to get the confidence back, because there were close games that we could have won, like Sheffield United and Crystal Palace, when things didn’t go as planned.

“Even today, I had four good opportunities that I wasn’t able to score, so on another day Chelsea might have got one and won the game, or drawn, so today worked out well for us, and we’re going to take the pluses and the confidence we built from them and move on to Wolves.”