When I say the the old West Ham are back, I’m not talking about Lyall, Brooking, academy football, Bobby Moore & playing the West Haw way. I mean the recently old West Ham are back.
Two seasons ago David Moyes had build a resilient Hammers team who counter attacked, bullied, pressed and out-ran the opposition. Okay, it wasn’t really traditional West Ham but it worked so who cared right?
I sometimes refer to it crassly as lock-down West Ham because we were at our best with Michail Antonio scaring the hell out of Premier League defenses. We were the hardest running team in the league and the very best at set-pieces. Every corner began to feel like a genuine opportunity to score a goal with Aaron Cresswell producing devilish deliveries.
West Ham are back
For most of the current season (and the second half of 21/22) our Premier League team has been barely recognisable. West Ham went from being the team who ran the most in the league to the least. The opta statistics also made for grim reading in almost every metric of the game from passing to tackling.
Probably most tellingly the threat from set-pieces completely evaporated, which bunted David Moyes tactics significantly. The corners and free-kicks had become a reliable source of goals over time and once they dried up there was nothing coming from open play either.
The reasons why the team had a 12 month dip in form can perhaps wait for another day, but the evidence would suggest that The Hammers are now in excellent form. The running, pressing, corners and rampaging Antonio all seem to be back and quite frankly we look like a different team.
Are the old Hammers back? I’m not sure but it might well be on the way.
Is it not just a case of the players coming back into form? Antonio, Bowen, Coufal seem to have found a level of consistency of late. Did they eat too many pies on their holidays? Are they finally fit. Certainly playing three times a week is going to get you fit whether you like it or not. Who knows. We’ve had good games earlier in the season. Was the 4 nil against Bournemouth any better than the 4 nil against Notinyour Forest earlier in the season. I’m not sure but it felt better didn’t it. Maybe because we’ve had a good run of ten or eleven games with only one loss. We’re picking up points and we’re progressing in Europe. It’s difficult playing In Europe as well as the premier league. I’ve said all season that if we stay up and win the European cup I’ll call it a great season. We’ve had a blip but now we seem to have gone back to playing the kind of Moyes ball I like so long may it continue.