Despite seven points in the last eight days, West Ham’s promotion challenge is just getting started. Just three points cover the top five sides in this league after a quarter of the fixtures. Bear in mind that one of those sides is Southampton, starting on ‘minus four’ thanks to their training ground spy gate issue from last season and it is evident that there’s no run away, dead certainty for promotion and it will more than likely come down to just a couple of points in May, just as relegation was decided last season.
Any one of the teams in the top half of the championship could go on a winning run and pick up four or five wins – the gap between first and twelfth is just eight points- meaning this is likely to be an extremely hard-fought season – as are they all within this, the most competitive, physically demanding league of them all.
Celebration at Swansea shows just how much victory against the league leaders meant to West Ham’s squad
Victory over Swansea helped West Ham cut the gap between themselves and the leaders to just one point: According to football.london the Swans boss sees no reason why his side should not go toe to toe with West Ham in the promotion race:
“What I saw today, I think we can compete against every team and that’s what we need to do. We need to keep pushing ourselves in that way. We need to keep pushing ourselves to beat the best teams in the league..
West Ham is one of the best teams. We tried, but unfortunately we could not get something out of the game and that’s the story….We played against a really good opponent that is one of the main contenders to go to the Premier League and we felt that we could compete and we could beat them as well.”
Evidently manager Vitor Matos believes his side’s promotion chances remain very much alive despite the home defeat (of course – they are still top of the division !) and is itching for another crack at his compatriot Nuno’s West Ham team.
He’ll have to wait until 16th January for a pop at West Ham for second time at London Stadium. By which time Nuno’s West Ham United will hopefully have got used to the home fan demands of being Championship favourites and will be as relaxed playing at home as they were combative away from home last weekend.
should ad been 1-4 but it wernt due to to many west ham players not turning up
Their finishing was atrocious, they could have drawn or won. Their keeper was man of the match though and was the thing that kept them in the game at all, they could have been beaten by more.