By Gonzo
If West Ham are relegated this season, David Sullivan will be viewed as culpable as David Moyes by the fan-base.
To be loyal and supportive to ones staff is an admirable quality, but the joint owners backing of David Moyes has gone too far now. I’m surprised the manager survived the 4-1 loss to Brighton, particularly given that he confronted the Hammers fans when we were singing ‘you don’t know what you’re doing’.
Sullivan was sitting in the stands just above and he’d certainly have noticed that, even if the touchline arguments between Moyes & Kevin Nolan escaped his attention. That action packed fixture on the South coast also included a touchline disagreement between the manager and some players, and I think I wrote at the time that he looked ‘isolated at West Ham’.
Quite how our owner can not see that his chosen manager is unable to motivate the players anymore is beyond me. The squad have leaked their unhappiness to the press, hinted at it during interviews and held clandestine meetings behind their boss’s back.
We’ve now taken a worse beating than the one Brighton inflicted upon us, and the team looks completely broken. David Moyes stood on the touchline at the London Stadium with his hands in his pockets unable to identify why Newcastle’s long passes were continually penetrating our defence.
He looked lost, unable to alter the game with his tactics or his substitutions. His removal of Michail Antonio was greeted with boo’s and left the team without it’s most effective player. Moyes answer was to deploy Danny Ings alone up front, despite two days earlier claiming that tactic as ineffective and unsuited to the player.
Sullivan continues to back Moyes
In short, Moyes can’t motivate the players, deploy his new signings correctly or adjust his tactics to combat the opposition. West Ham are absolutely one one the three worst teams in the league but the ownership seem frozen with inactivity.
Following the sacking of Brendan Rodgers there was some bizarre reasoning for not hiring him to replace David Moyes. To paraphrase, it was suggested that his record was not better than that of the current West Ham manager despite him winning numerous trophies at two different clubs. To believe that a manager who has failed to win a trophy in over 1000 games in comparable to a winner is somewhat deluded in my opinion.
As someone said to me earlier in the week . . . . “It’s as if they want us to go down”.
David Moyes has lost the dressing room, lost the majority of fans, and he consistently gets outsmarted by opposition coaches. I’d dearly love to know which qualities David Sullivan or to a lesser extent Daniel Kretinsky see in the current manager that warrants such faith and belief.
The strapline “There’s nobody available better than Moyes” is beginning to look quite ridiculous now.