Breathe

I’m glad I gave myself over a week to write about West Ham, because I needed a little sulk first . There is a little child in all us football fans, who just wants everything to be how we want it to be and when things go wrong stamps their feet. So there is always some good in taking a beat (perhaps the only good in these interminable international breaks).

A bit of time to get some perspective and resist some knee jerk judgements on players and systems. Our heavy defeat at West Ham wasn’t completely characteristic of our previous performances, games in which we generally competed well. Indeed, beating us had so far been beyond everyone bar Manchester City and Liverpool. Yes, some of the flaws on display were familiar, but exaggerated by the game suddenly slipping away from us in the minutes before and after half-time. It is a mistake to get too low about this performance and forget the encouragement we took from previous ones.

Yet, it is also too easy to find false comfort in the wake of a heavy defeat in the Premier League. You examine the opposition, you pick out their best players (Jarred Bowen! Mohammed Kudus! Lucas Paquetá!) and you declare that this was never a game you expected to win. You can chuck in some complaints about the view and the quality of the home support for additional comfort if you like. That was, you tell yourself, an established top division side, whose currently humble league position belies the underlying quality of their players.

This kind of bargaining is also probably a mistake. You do have to face things how they are. I didn’t walk into the London Stadium thinking West Ham United away was an unwinnable game where the home side would rip us to shreds, so I can’t rationally write the game off in hindsight. This was a team who had started the season in bad to middling fashion, with a poor fit of a manager who was chased out of Sevilla with pitchforks. There are not enough games against teams lesser than the Irons to talk easily of focusing our efforts elsewhere and I had hoped we’d contend for a win in this one.

You might have taken a good performance and a narrow defeat, but even with result set aside, there was zero comfort to be taken from the game itself. This was a chastening rout that played into many of the concerns I had momentarily parked after the Villa game. We were largely impotent from open play (six shots total, three from range, two in the dying embers long after the game was over), despite some substantial phases of controlled possession in their half. But that was almost by-the-by. I don’t expect us to be battering the opposition’s door down in many away games this season and as our centre forward is currently shooting more efficiently than Erling Haaland (36 per cent of Liam Delap’s shots have been goals to the Norwegian’s frankly rather profligate 28 per cent), for the moment we don’t really need to.

It was at the other end of the pitch that frankly awful things were happening. West Ham had 13 shots on target, apparently the most they’ve ever managed in a Premier League match. Focus inevitably falls on individual errors – Kalvin Phillips’ undercooked pass for the first goal, Ben Johnson’s overcooked pass for the third – but considerable work remained between those giveaways and a good shooting opportunity, whilst goals two and four came against set defences.

There were echoes of our trip to Southampton here, both home teams finding it all too easy to convert possession and territory into big chances. West Ham only really needed to glance at our penalty area and things opened right up for them. Against the Saints the long straight ball was the main problem, against West Ham defending crosses was our kryptonite. Across the whole game, the Hammers only had 11 opportunities to put the ball into the box from wide (relative to our 15) and from them reaped considerable reward – goals 2 and 4, plus another absolute sitter that Kudus helped on to the post in the first half. This extended a recent pattern, in that we also managed to concede one massive opportunity from just four crosses against Aston Villa. Generally speaking, an ordinary defence would expect to concede only once every 45 or so crosses.

We couldn’t defend for long periods, couldn’t profit during the periods we were on top. We conceded a volume of chances you’d be a touch embarrassed to have allowed during a visit to East Manchester, let alone East London. No individual covered themselves in glory, so I’m reluctant to single anyone out, though you can probably imagine from the crossing stat where our most urgent issues might be. This was the first time this season where we looked like a team that might finish twentieth. 

Deep breath though. We have been here before relatively recently. We got to half time at Elland Road last season having been smashed to pieces. Our star player had given away a penalty and an own goal, Leeds had looked like scoring every time they came forward. If the home side hadn’t taken their foot off the gas after scoring a fourth early in the second half, the score really could have been anything at all. Going the other way our attackers had left no dent on the Whites’ apparently impenetrable back line (thankfully QPR found it far more porous). It felt utterly delusional in that moment to believe we could compete with Leeds over the rest of that season. The days when you get it wrong, where even your best players are a three out of ten (you’ll bounce back Kalv, Leif did!), where you make every possible error and get punished, they don’t determine everything.

Some games accelerate away from you, going from even to evisceration in a less than 10 minutes of football, perhaps more regularly when your manager is set on a relatively high-risk style of play. You wonder if our aggressive out-of-possession structure (documented very interestingly here) is a bit of a high wire act. One wrong move, one lapse in concentration and things go wrong real quick. Our worst moments this season have tended to come in the form of brief blasts rather than across entire games.

If we are going to progress to the point where we can stay in this division, it probably is not going to be linear progress. It could well be than any longer term uptick is still sprinkled with intermittent absolute kickings. Aston Villa some weeks and West Ham in others (not too often I hope, it was all rather unpleasant). It is which kind of performance is closest to par that matters most.

At times we have solved some of the challenges West Ham posed. At Brighton we did show that we could defend our penalty box against quality wingers for long periods (my absolute best wishes to thus far Player of the Season Axel Tuanzebe, by the way, get well soon and please sign a new contract). Against Villa and Fulham we did show we could maintain a high line without getting picked off too regularly on the break. At times in those two games the likes of Davis, Clarke, Hutchinson and Delap also demonstrated they could stretch Premier League defences. Over time you have to trust we will put more of those pieces together in the same 90 minutes.

Last Saturday probably wiped away what remained of any 2022-24 momentum (not that many of our current starters were around to absorb it anyway), but hope still abounds. We have been better previously than the East London debacle and will be better in future. Under McKenna you have to believe there’s a longer-term plan to get us where we need to be, even after a largely irredeemable afternoon. It will require a bit of patience and a bit of faith.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

Liam Delap per 90 so far this season

Goals 0.66

xG 0.19

xGOT 0.47

Shots 1.83

Shots on target 1.16

Assists 0.0

Expected Assists 0.01

Successful passes 4.98

Pass accuracy 54.5%

Chances created 0.83

Successful dribbles 0.83

Dribble success 50%

Touches 24.6

Touches in opposition box 3.32

Dispossessed 1.99

Fouls won 1.83

Tackles 0.17

Tackles won 33%

Duels won 4.15 (37.3%)

Interceptions 0.17

Blocks 0.33

Fouls 2.32

Recoveries 2.66

Possession won attacking third 0.66