New team, new start – same dismal result for Hammers’ infamous bench warmer

I try very hard not to be rude or discourteous to players as their life is one I have never experienced: The stresses on the body are enormous and the sacrifices to play top-level sport are decades-long hard physical graft and denial of the things most of us enjoy daily: carbs, pizza, beer, chocolate – but sometimes the urge to criticise just gets the better of me.

When West Ham United signed Maxwel Cornet from Burnley, fan sites for the Clarets were full of messages along lines of ‘great player but always injured’. And so it proved to be as his Hammers career never got going. The player fell out with David Moyes after disappearing for months for ‘treatment’ to a calf injury in France and his career was over before it began.

Wearing ’14’ in West Ham’s squad presumably to denote the number of minutes he played each season, in the post-Moyes era Cornet was auditioned in pre-season summer ’24 and them summarily dispatched on loan in August – one of Lopetegui’s better decisions – to Southampton.

However even the bottom club in the Premier League couldn’t find a use for him and he was returned to West Ham in the window just gone.

Incredibly, last month West Ham found another club willing to loan the £55k a a week winger and he was dispatched off to Genoa, in Italy’s Seria A with new hope that he might get some game time and who knows, find a club who would like to keep him.

Checking up on him I found reports last week (fantacalcio.net)  that ‘Cornet.. skipped the training session for a muscle problem,” ..and then worse followed.. this weekend’s  match preview for his adoptive club Genoa’s Seria A clash against Torino (footitalia.com) confirmed – yes, you guessed it – “However, another new signing, Maxwell Cornet, is unavailable due to a thigh injury.”

Is this the worst £17 million signing in West Ham’s history?

Surely at the end of his loan – if he even gets a game this season – it must be time to bite the bullet, cancel his West Ham contract, pay him off  and show him the door. (And preferably send the bill to David Moyes who signed him in the first place).

Cornet has TWO more years of his £55k a week contract to run. Must be time to cut the club’s losses and end this embarrassing episode.