What if the Premier League started in Week 5? West Ham ahead of Man Utd in the table if you remove first four losses!

West Ham, as we all know, had a horror start to the 2018/19 Premier League season under new manager Manuel Pellegrini, losing their first four league games of the campaign. They were beaten 4-0 by Liverpool on the opening weekend, then went down 2-1 to Bournemouth at home, were impressive but lost to Unai Emery’s Arsenal at the Emirates, and finally conceded a late goal to Adama Traore as Wolves emerged 1-0 victors at the London Stadium.

Since then, Chilean gaffer Pellegrini has managed to turn things around a bit, even though the club have had their spells of inconsistency. Despite several first team members missing through injury (Lanzini, Arnautovic, Sanchez, Wilshere, Yarmolenko and Fredericks to name a few!), the Hammers have managed to come up with a three game winning streak ahead of this weekend’s fixture against Fulham. They’ve also always given a good account of themselves against the “big teams” this season- drawing against Chelsea, beating Man Utd, and narrowly losing to Spurs. They also had their chances against Man City, whom Pep Guardiola described as “lucky” to have beaten the Hammers.

We decided to take a look at the league table if it began in GW5, excluding the first four losses of the campaign. Some interesting findings! [Read more…]

Will Fulham’s Takeover Affect West Ham?

After hearing Sam Allardyce’s comments on how the Fulham takeover may affect West Ham I got to thinking, will it eventually become a problem for the Hammers?

I have always admired Fulham and how they have dealt with things, every year they finish rather comfortably in the league, instead of spending copious amounts of money on players they aim to sign 2 maybe 3 key players who normally make a big difference for the club. It always seems to work for them and the fans never really complain. [Read more…]

Hammers on song with a 3 nil win over Fulham

andy carroll debut for hammers

I’m sure Hammers fans everywhere were singing to the tune of I’m forever blowing bubbles after their win yesterday against Martin Jol’s Fulham. It was meant to be a tough match especially after West Ham have not got out of the starting blocks as quickly as we have liked.

And Andy Carroll, our latest signing on loan from liverpool, set up two of the 3 goals that left Fulham reeling and licking their wounds. The first goal came with just a minute on the clock when Carroll laid off a nice header for Vaz Té to tee-up captain Nolan to poke the first one in – nice.

Then it was Winston Reid’s turn to score by putting away a free header on 29 minutes. It was the perfect start to a match and Carroll was dominating the Cottagers defence and running wild. Just before half time, Carroll also had a hand in Matt Taylor’s strike to make it 3 nothing and making it back to back home wins for the irons!

The big man hobbled off at 68 minutes to a well deserved standing ovation from the West Ham crowd with a hamstring problem which looks like causing Roy Hodgson problems for the next few England games against Moldova and Ukraine.

Andy Carroll had lifted the Hammers and the match was put to bed effectively in the first half with the home side running riot. The big guy has an arial presence that is sublime and Big Sam has provided his side with a player that can provide a platform for the likes of  Matt Taylor, Mohamed Diame and Ricardo Vaz Te so they can run at defences and cause upsets.

Fulham had little response to the first goal from Nolan and things just got worse for them. With Carroll’s arial ability and Ricardo Vaz Te’s ability to run at his opponents, a cracking game of football was always on the cards and the crowd were loving it.

Fulham boys Damien Duff and Steve Sidwell had a few long range shots that were easily dealt with but they posed no serious threat to a West Ham that was growing in confidence.

Defensive errors from Fulham

Martin Jol lamented Fulham’s inability to deal with Carroll’s superb arial ability:

“If you are 5ft 8ins or 5ft 10ins tall maybe you have got a problem but we should have coped with it.

“Every game you see him, in the European Championships, you see he is good in the air, he is probably the best in the Premier League but I still feel there are a few answers for that but we couldn’t cope with that.

“The only positive for today was to see Dimitar Berbatov again and to see his class and quality, I have missed it.

All in all, Fulham had slightly more ball possession than the Hammers but it really didn’t matter. If you can’t put the ball away then something’s amiss, isn’t it? I’ll give you the example of the excellent Barcelona – what’s the point in achieving 68% ball possession when the other team wins – something’s not quite right. Don’t get me wrong, Barca is still the best team in the world but their continuous passing around and trying to wear opponents out is wearing a little thin for me. How about you?