THE SEASON STARTS HERE
West Ham 0 Manchester City 2
David Moyes faces the difficult third season. He has signed two young players born in January 1999, Gianluca Scamacca from Italian Seria A team Sassuolu and Flynn Downes, an Essex boy from Brentwood, from Swansea City. He also finds his team on the first day of the season facing the League Champions Manchester City, a team whose bench could give most Premier League sides a run for their Crypto.
The team Moyes selects is just one man different to the side who lost the Europa League semi-final in Germany last May, and that man is Craig Dawson, who is currently out with a calf injury.
This is the earliest start to a Premier League season in its short thirty year history, but it’s a credit to Moyes that his side aren’t cut from the cloth of the Pellegrini mould that would often today write off their chances against a top four team before a ball was even kicked. Now Hammers are a competitive outfit, finishing the last two seasons sixth and seventh, and looking like a team capable of pushing to break into the top four.
But City. They have signed Erling Haaland in the close season, a player whose goal to game ratio is so prolific that he strikes abject terror into all otherwise fearless international opponents. He is the better part of six and a half foot in his socks, and has hair that is so blonde that it seems like lightning in the sun. He carries the kind of half smile you might see on Clint Eastwood or Billy the Kid, and he barely breaks sweat in most of the games I’ve already seen him play. He has a ludicrous habit of scoring hat-tricks for his new clubs on debut. Declan Rice gives him the critical eye in the tunnel as both teams return from their pre-match warm up.
Scamacca is also gawkishly tall, but his menace is in his gangsta calm, his polite grim stealth. He won’t be starting this afternoon, but we have it on good authority that Moyes will give him a run out in the second half.
West Ham begin the game with all the joy of the rush of last season. High crosses, neat flicked headers, and targets missed by inches. A long, deep corner by Fornals sees first Zouma and then Antonio send headers goalward, before Bowen has a thunder blaster of an effort blocked by the knee of Nathan Ake.
The game isn’t going to sustain this speed without the onset of mistakes, and when City begin to acquire periods of possession, they come. Jarrod Bowen seems to be the unformatted version of two years ago, over-running short passes and mistiming others that he spent all last season crafting to perfection. Souček is finally back on form, leaping like a salmon at corner kicks, timing tackles to perfection and winning challenges with the world beaters in City’s ludicrously talented eleven.
City, however, are from another planet this afternoon, and how it showed once they stepped up their game. 62,443 is a new attendance record at London Stadium, but it’s a tough watch for most of them.
Fabianski suffers a dead leg just on the half hour and is replaced by substitute keeper Areola who has barely marked his area out before he is slow off his line to a through ball from Gündogan that frees Haaland, and he brings him down for a penalty that the Norwegian striker dispatches with ease. I can’t be the only one in the crowd wondering if this will be the first of three.
Hammers continue to struggle for the rest of the half but start the second with an interception opportunity that Lanzini grabs off Gündogan, to generate a move ending with Rice frustratingly spooning over the rare opportunity.
Minutes later a through ball from De Bruyne finds Haaland again, and the big striker shows calm and poise to make it 2-0. Thankfully even Pep Guardiola doesn’t want his new striker making it another hat-trick debut, substituting his bombed blond shell twelve minutes before the end for Alvarez. Modesty is a pre-requisite for Pep’s Pups, and in amongst all of this perfection he gives a debut from the bench to ex-Leeds midfielder Kalvin Phillips, the player who Declan Rice established such a powerful partnership with for England in the Euros. Phillips now wears 4 for Manchester City, effectively a squad player, unlikely to start many games for his club this season. Hammers scored in every home Premier League game last season, but today they have netted a zero in their first fixture of 2022-23.
There is a comforting double negative to reflect on from the folder of established hopes I often drag from the rucksack of defeats like this. West Ham began their brilliant 2019-20 season with a miserable 0-2 home reverse at the hand of Steve Bruce’s Newcastle United. By the time that season was over, the team was unrecognisable in performances from the one that lost that game. I ponder the idea that this might be another one of those games. Turning over Jesse Lingard’s Nottingham Forest next weekend might be exactly the cure for this afternoon’s disappointments.
1 Lucasz Fabianski, 2 Ben Johnson, 3 Aaron Cresswell, 4 Kurt Zouma, 5 Vladimir Coufal, 41 Declan Rice (captain), 28 Tomas Souček, 8 Pablo Fornals, 9 Michail Antonio, 10 Manuel Lanzini, 20 Jarrod Bowen
Substitutes: 13 Alphonse Areola, 22 Saïd Benrahma, 7 Gianluca Scamacca, 12 Flynn Downes, 32 Connor Coventry
