“Still in love with the Hammers but it’s a tainted love”

Nigel Kahn looks over a new season of discontent and believes rank and file fans showing a hostile reaction are not necessarily responding to what’s happening on the pitch but to what’s happened in the past couple of years.

Sack the board, sack the board, sack the board” the chants rang out during the first half of the Tottenham game, perhaps a reflection of what was happening before our eyes as yet again a season an inept performance was being played out.

It goes deeper than that though. This  is not just frustration from the debacles of recent weeks; it goes back far further and links into  the marketing of the move and the way  rank and file West Ham fans feel generally about the club.

When the owners bought the club, they proceeded to what I describe as launcing a project called: ‘Modernise West Ham United.’ With Brady on board they changed the culture, to use her own words, of the way they wanted West Ham to be seen. No longer would we be the poor relations of top flight London, they wanted us to be the LONDON club, effectively they wanted to change the DNA of the club.

No longer would just scraping by making do. No  longer did they want the glorious victories over the big boys fragmented by the embarrassing defeats by the minnows and the annihilations when the big boys came back.

We all know how they set about doing that, change the stadium, Bigger is better in the modern day football world, Change the badge, cross hammers is fine but were not East London, we are LONDON, as the badge screams. When players are unveiled, The subliminal message is there even in the background, the images are the London skyline, not the east London skyline. They want the world to come to see us and know who we are.

All good sentiments im sure, but does it resonate with the rank and file fans.

At the Boleyn, apart from 2015/16, there was around 20,000 season ticket holders, fans that would generally attend 95% of all home games no matter what the result was, nor the performance the week before. I may be generalising but I reckon most realised that the chances of a top 10 finish was borderline, and that a good cup run was getting to a quarter final, personally that was my bench mark.

Fast forward to now, is that benchmark acceptable?

The 20,000 season ticket holders is now 50,000, a big big uplift no doubt about that, but the 30,000 new season ticket holders didn’t materalise from thin air. When the season ticket capacity at the Boleyn was 26,000 why did we only hit that the season after the FA cup final in 2006 and in the last season. What changed at the club?

Well, The DNA of the club.

No longer were we going to be the unpredictable West Ham, the team that scrapes by, getting beat by the lower teams only to then turn round and beat the reigning champions. Mid table obscurity or relegation scraps is not for the new west ham, no sir, we will be propelled into the big league, that seemingly closed shop at the top of the table, we will be propelled into to the Next level.

And so, a success starved fan base came back to the fold, wanting to see this new dawn, accepting the modernisation, accepting of the wiping away of the Family friendly back street East end culture that actually, made the club what it was.

Not happening though is it, with every Brighton game that is followed by a Tottenham in the cup game, what is evident is that on the pitch, the same old West Ham is there. Down on its knees, but then comes out fighting when the chips are down.

Great when it comes off, but that generally is only 25% of the time.

Problem with that, is that a lot of fans thought those days were gone, the realization that we are still the same old West Ham just in a different ground is too much for many, and so like the cheated on spouse, they turn on those they perceived to have cheated them, in this case, the board.

My biggest fear about the move was what happened if West Ham simply stayed as West Ham in a different stadium. Would the fans that watched in pubs, that came every other game or every third game, or even had stopped altogether but now wanted to come back, stay, or would they go back to what they had done for the previous years, shrugging their shoulders saying: “Well  we gave it a go.”

Allied to that are the fans, small in number but still not insignificant, who now feel so detached from the club they once loved, who can’t accept an athletics stadium can be an upgrade on a smaller football stadium.

They walk away, still on love, but a tainted love of a divorced couple. Unlike like marriage though, you can’t fall in love with another, generally football fans are monogamous and love for life.

Our owners are top business man and like all top business men they come with egos, they want a legacy to be left, they want to be the people that took little old West Ham and made them a global team.

Problem is, their legacy at the moment is one of destruction of a way of life for many of those rank and file, personally, I will never forgive them for that.

Traditionalist, Dinosaur, Luddite, – I’ve been called them all, but hand on heart, are we really a better club now than we were five years ago; more importantly will we be a better club in  years time, because if the answer is no, then I hate to think what the fans will be chanting. be.

The views expressed here are those of the blogger and are not necessarily shared by ClaretandHugh