ALLEZ HALLER!
West Ham 1 Crystal Palace 1
I tend to spend my waking moments on any given day shuffling through the various tweets that the Hammerati have seen fit to post after I have achieved shut eye, or put up during a sleepless night before my waking to placate their worries about the team.
These posts tend to run in what I might call gloops. There will be a basic idea, say ‘We need to offload Haller in January’ or ‘Don’t be fooled by Cresswell having a couple of good games – he is shit’ or even ‘Can’t wait for Noble and Antonio to get back so we start winning again’. The one thing common to most of these posts is that they appear to have been written by ‘fans’ that may have not watched a whole match involving the club for many years, possibly even decades. So what to do? Replies are generally swift, and go along the lines of ‘You on the gear, mate?’ (I put the question mark in for clarity) ‘Declan next boss’ or even ‘This Tweet might include sensitive content’.
Twitter is for mugs, I guess, though I can’t get off it for now. It is like an alternative reality that you need to keep an eye on in case you miss something. This of course includes missing the chance to come up with a wise guy piss-taking response that will get you a sackful of ‘likes’ and maybe even the odd ‘follow’.
Which was why at half-time in this match, I trawled through the ‘thinking aloud’ postings and read a stack of the usual tripe about Sébastien Haller’s work rate and strike rate. Recalling ‘boo boys’ from the past, before the days of Twitter (Alan Curbishley, Kevin Keen, Frank Lampard jnr.) generally authored by ‘fans’ looking for ‘targets’ rather than getting behind the team, it suddenly occurred to me. Here comes a Haller moment. Maybe the Haller moment. I must keep my eye on the ‘feed’ throughout the second half.
Palace had proved by far the better side in the first half, no surprise to anyone who has seen how they have played at our ground over the past four or five seasons (with the exception of the ‘Andy Carroll overhead wonder goal’ 3-0 victory in 2016-17). First Zaha, then Townsend, then Eze and Benteke all made inroads into our slightly wobbly defence. Diop, coming in for the injured Balbuena, looked a little uneasy at times, and then Cresswell was caught out on a couple of occasions, one of these being when Joel Ward pushed past him on the right to put in a cross which Benteke stooped beyond his marker Diop to head deftly past Fabianski. Yes that’s right, Benteke, another player who has endured years of bully boy tactics from Aston Villa and Liverpool fans. Now he’s at Palace and is scoring for fun, three in his last three games. Ward had already picked Benteke out twenty minutes prior to the goal but the Belgian striker had headed down and wide. Rice managed to pick out Coufal on the right and the Czech right centre back (#NewBonds) managed to get in several crosses, one which Fornals connected well with, just inches away from the target with his header. Benrahma had an oddly quiet half, and would be eventually substituted in the second near the end by Robert Snodgrass.
Perhaps the old West Ham might have succumbed, especially one playing so poorly directly after Friday’s win at Elland Road. Man of the match Coufal had other ideas, another of his many crosses dropping perfectly for Haller to strike sweetly with an acrobatic overhead past Guaita. The subdued solemn celebration neatly underpinned the delicious quality of the goal. I searched the Twitter feed to find the usual stack of idiots who had trolled Haller throughout the first half, and pinged back opportunistically, ‘this tweet has aged marginally better than your mother’. So what if my account gets suspended, I thought. It will have been worth it.
Benteke received his second yellow for an elbow on Soucek in an aerial tangle, but Hammers were unable to take advantage of the extra man in the last twenty minutes and it ended up dishonours even. Palace’s Roy Hodgson celebrated Haller’s ‘wonder goal’ in his post match interview, commenting, ‘You don’t see goals like that every day.’ The interviewer should then have replied, ‘But Roy, Andy Carroll scored one just like that here against Palace in January 2017.’
So I concede that starting with Benrahma may not necessarily mean a win for the Hammers, but it was at least a point gained out of a disappointing performance. The question is now, can the team muster something special like they did last season on their journey to Stamford Bridge?
1 Lucasz Fabianski, 21 Angelo Ogbonna, 23 Issa Diop, 3 Aaron Cresswell, 5 Vladimir Coufal, 41 Declan Rice (c), 28 Tomas Soucek, 9 Saïd Benrahma, 18 Pablo Fornals 20 Jarrod Bowen, 22 Sébastien Haller
Substitutes:, 7 Andriy Yarmolenko, 14 Manuel Lanzini, 11 Robert Snodgrass
Scorer: Sébastien Haller
