The late change of personnel ahead of yesterday’s victory against a lacklustre Derby County was purely due to an injury scare.
Pablo Felipe suffered ‘ a knock’ in the warm up and sat out the game from the sidelines as Joel Piroe got promoted to the starting eleven and celebrated with a classic poacher’s goal in the sixth minute, perhaps pointing out to Nuno the way ahead – with two ‘proper’ strikers – this season.
The Hammers have missed the classic ‘fox in the box‘ style forward which only really works as one of a pairing, as Danny Ings used to find out when started on his own by successive managers.
Pablo’s absence- hopefully short-lived – does point out the limited resources available to Nuno, having sold Callum Marshall (who is now ripping it up at Luton Town ) and loaned out young striker Josh Landers to Ayr United.
The earlier noise surrounding Pablo’s future, amid links to Turkey, is surely done and dusted until January at least with the Turkish window now closed.
Kante’s injury time stunner underlines his value as a driving, attacking midfielder
However his absence did emphasise that adding a free -agent signing (still allowed after the window closure) to replace Callum Wilson would make a lot of sense: But on the other hand if Nuno’s substitutes keep on scoring as they did yesterday, a ‘spare’ centre forward might not be required as the energetic Austvø and driving Mohamadou Kanté finished Derby off yesterday.
As Nuno looks as if he’s started to work out his options, along with the rest of us he’ll be breathing a sigh of relief when comparing his side’s eighth place with that of fellow relegation sufferers Burnley who now sit rock bottom of the table.
As always with this division, there are no points for style. Take the three points, chalk off another ‘win’ on the wall chart and move on to the next one. As former Hammers boss Alan Pardew pointed out last week, just the twenty six more wins needed now. Yikes.
Allardyce used to say 2 points a game gets you promoted and if we can’t win 28 games and a few draws with the quality we have we don’t deserve to go up.
Personally I would be sewing the seeds with Eddie Howe now to see if he feels like returning there are sufficient alarm bells with Nuno that even though he will do a good job in this league we will have problems in the future. The major one is how he goes into his shell when results aren’t happening and he is predominantly negative. We need someone around the training ground to lighten the mood and lift the players when they need that and am not seeing that, hopefully Austbo turns out to be Rice like with a stupid sense of humour that makes everyone laugh.