Our Days Are Few

A blog for West Ham supporters

Articles

HAMMERS IN THE MOUNTAINS OF MOROCCO

HAMMERS IN THE MOROCCAN MOUNTAINS

The 8th September earthquake in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains, southwest of Marrakech, killed thousands of people and injured many more, making thousands homeless in towns and remote mountain villages. It was the worst natural disaster in the country for over fifty years. John Ratomski, who runs Irons Supporting Foodbanks, organised the club’s involvement and response, funded by Hammers fans’ contributions and a generous donation from West Ham’s Moroccan international Nayef Aguerd. I joined John in a visit to witness what he and the British Moroccan Society, with support from Global Medic, the people of Dar Tassa, the local youth association and John’s contact in Marrakech, Ella Williams, have managed to organise there.

On our first full day we travelled to Amassin and Takoucht with a hundred bags of supplies, the contents all carefully co-ordinated by nutritionists, after consultation with local people, to maximise usage and eliminate wastage. We were able to access the village of Amassin in the 4×4 vehicles driven by local volunteers, where the first 68 bags were delivered and we were fed a delicious lunch of local freshly cooked bread, olive oil and mint tea. The second visit to the smaller village, Takoucht, inaccessible by road after damage from the earthquake, required a group of locals to travel up to meet us at a halfway point with eight donkeys, each carrying four bags back to their village, ten miles away. It was an incredible effort, particularly by the donkeys!

There is no shortage of football interest in the country, in particular since the Moroccan national side finished third in the World Cup in Qatar in 2022. We had the chance to witness this enthusiasm on the Wednesday evening with hundreds of fans, watching the national side’s first game in the African Cup of Nations against Tanzania on big screens at a local café. The atmosphere was electric, as was the football from the national side, who ran out 3-0 winners, their defence expertly marshalled by Aguerd, wearing the number 5 shirt.

The following day, armed with a large bag of goodies John had brought from the UK and a stack of West Ham shirts generously donated by the club, we journeyed out to Tassaouirgane, a small community out in the mountains, 50 miles out from Marrakech. The early part of the afternoon was spent working with primary school aged children, organising drawing and colouring competitions, and handing out prizes at the end. In the late afternoon a five a side football competition was organised, the sides who won the toss getting to wear the West Ham shirts, though the second prize of John’s Irons Supporting Foodbanks home and away kits were no less gleefully received. After a tight 4-4 game, the final was decided on penalties, the winners narrowly shading the shoot out 1-0. It was particularly rewarding to witness the delight and enthusiasm of all the children from the villages and to have played a small part in the effort from all the people whose generosity and time had made the whole thing possible.

Come on you Irons! (Supporting Foodbanks)!

History In The Making

History is in the making on Thursday evening at London Stadium as West Ham United prepare for the fifth European Competition Quarter Final in their history.
Bobby Moore captained the Hammers in 1965 when they faced Lausanne from Switzerland at Upton Park in the first ever European Quarter-Final in their history, which they won 4-3 with two goals from Brian Dear, after winning the first leg 2-1 away.
Bobby Moore was back again with his West Ham side in 1966, as the holders of the trophy, when they faced Magdeburg of East Germany in the quarter final first leg, and like tonight it was at home. They won that game 1-0 with a goal from Johnny Byrne, and then drew the away fixture 1-1 to progress to the semi-final for the second year in succession. Bobby Moore would lift the World Cup for England a few months later.
It was another ten years before West Ham progressed to another European quarter-final. This time they were captained in 1976 by the legendary Billy Bonds. West Ham were drawn against the Dutch Cup Winners Den Haag, and although Hammers lost the first leg in Holland 4-2, they won the return leg at Upton Park 3-1 on a memorable night under the floodlights with goals from Alan Taylor, Frank Lampard and Bonds himself, and West Ham went through to the semi-finals on the away goals rule. West Ham were back again in the quarter-finals five years later led once more by Billy Bonds. In the first leg they faced a Russian side Dynamo Tblisi who were too strong for them in the first game at Upton Park, running out 4-1 winners on the night, and although West Ham beat Tblisi 1-0 in the return leg, and were only the third side to win there in European competition in six years, they went out of the competition that night, 4-2 on aggregate.
The away goals rule applies no longer, but tonight, forty-one years later, Declan Rice will become only the third West Ham captain ever to lead his side out to a European Competition Quarter Final. The opposition tonight is Lyon, the team from the capital city of the Auvergne, a south eastern French city close to the Swiss and Italian borders. Lyon qualified for tonight’s game by beating FC Porto of Portugal 2-1 over two legs, drawing 1-1 at home after winning the away leg 1-0.
Whatever happens tonight, history will have been made for Declan Rice and his West Ham United team, as both sides fight for the right to play Eintracht Frankfurt or Barcelona in the semi-finals later this month.
Come On You Irons!

Andrew Palmer – Taking Sport Seriously (1959-2021)

Andrew Palmer (1959-2021)

I lost my friend Andrew Palmer in September 2021. He was an executive sports producer, a man whose presence, working for both ILC Sport and ADI, was vital for many of the West Ham United DVD programmes produced from 1999-2008. We also made video films together for Leeds United, Everton and Chelsea during that period, some that are still sold in the respective club shops to this day, but it was for his creative work at West Ham United that he will be remembered.

‘An unstoppable force against an immoveable object’ This was a pretty decent description of Andrew in his many professional battles with his beloved West Ham. If he wanted to do something and copyright or other hiccuppy issues got in the way of his vision, he would juggle, reconnoitre, make a few phone calls, reframe and even go right to the top to get a change of mind sent back down the line. He would have enjoyed the fact that when it was asked of the club whether we could use the crest on the order of service programme at his funeral, they said the application could take up to fourteen days. I suggested using the older – and arguably better – Upton Park club crest from when Andrew worked with the club, so in the end we used that. Of course if we’d had Andrew there, he’d have got it sorted in a couple of days. On the day we decided to use the old version, West Ham sent through confirmation that we could use the new one. I think that would have tickled Andrew.

Andrew (never ‘Andy’) was born on 1st July 1959 in Orpington, Kent, and was just a year younger than me. I met Andrew because of our mutual love and suffering from being long term West Ham United fans, so without the club we would not have met. We were from the same era – a club that produced three World Cup winners who (weirdly) won nothing more with West Ham after that fabulous day in 1966.

Andrew worked with fellow rights licensee Nigel Wood from 1990 when they were both involved with Italia ’90, and they formed the International Licensing Company (thats ILC to you and me) in 1996. They happened to secure the rights to a VHS video programme about the latest England teenage superstar, Michael Owen in 1998, the same year he finished equal top scorer in the Premier League with Chris Sutton and Dion Dublin in his first full season for Liverpool, and they sold many thousands of copies, establishing themselves with a financial ground base to grow their film, music and now football operation, entitled ILC Sport. His mission statement for the company was Taking Sport Seriously, something he always did.

I first met Andrew at the offices of ADI in Preston. He was the director of ILC Sport. I was the match commentator for West Ham and had already started to produce their football DVDs for ADI, so a meet with Andrew who would be marketing all the football product, was always going to happen. We were the two Londoners, met in the North West with equal measures of suspicion and cynicism. Two of the editors at Preston asked me, each separately, just who the scary gangland London bloke in the leather jacket was. Andrew spoke in a low voice and rarely smiled when he was at meetings in Preston. He told me he always behaved that way at ADI because he was a little nervous and wanted to see what they had to offer before he got involved with them. Because of this enigmatic low profile delivery the younger staff there became terrified of him. Hilarious, because anyone who got to know Andrew knew what a generous and loveable man he was.

Nigel and Andrew set themselves up in an office in Marylebone, and that was where I first spent time with Andrew in London. I usually left the ILC offices with bags of product, music and football DVDs. Andrew drove a metallic blue Mercedes, number plate WHU 5. Needless to say I was majorly impressed, perhaps more so by the plate than the car.

Andrew himself was romantically impressed by one of the women working in media distribution he had come into contact with over the years. He told me about her and wondered what I thought about it all. You’re my age, I told him. Don’t hang around. He didn’t, and Andrew and Liz were married on 16th June 2001. What I loved most about Liz when I met her was that she called him ‘Palmer’. You can’t buy that kind of irreverence. The editors at ADI might have seen him as Harry Palmer, whereas I saw him more as Geoffrey Palmer. But I loved the bloke – he always gave good copy too, and had good ideas. A natural for the business.

Thanks to Andrew I got to stay at the ex- Ceaușescu hotel in Romania with the West Ham team when we covered their European game against Steaua Bucharest  and I travelled with him to Spain for a few days interviewing and making a programme about Julian Dicks. Andrew also came up with the idea for a programme about Paolo Di Canio, challenging me to turn the five minute interview we’d been promised with him after training into a DVD programme. I cornered Di Canio and we flattered the poor man almost unconscious with our idolising behaviour, keeping him there for an hour and a half, and eventually turning the interview into two DVDs that still sell in West Ham shops, twenty years on. We also flew out with the West Ham team for a pre-season friendly against Celtic, where Di Canio was also idolised, and he scored for West Ham in a 2-1 defeat. We made a piece for the 1999-2000 video that featured an interview with Harry Redknapp and Martin O’Neill, then managing Celtic. This inside story made on a whim was the kind of thing Andrew invariably persuaded the club to get involved with.

Nigel and Andrew left Marylebone at the end of 2003 and went to work from Pinewood Studios. Then Nigel died suddenly and unexpectedly and ADI binned off ILC Sport, so Andrew had to rebuild and downsize, but he did it without self-pity or recriminations. I never found him bitter or reproachful, whilst he had more than enough reason to feel hard done by. Liz would have been vital and inspiring to build that on, but these were hard times, and when Andrew’s problems with his heart required a replacement operation, it looked like fate was wrestling something out of my friend. He battled back. I saw him in hospital and he came back from being as ill as I’d ever seen anyone, to look both dapper and recovered at his sixtieth in Leek back in late June 2019.

You would never have known what he had gone through and it was great to see him at the top of his game again. Somehow all the more tragic then for him to have been struck down by the pandemic after having beaten virtually everything life had thrown at him in the last fifteen years.

My final thoughts return to West Ham United where it all started for both of us. Andrew left us on 1st September 2021, around the same time as West Ham United found themselves top of the Premier League and the team that were propping all the others up in bottom position were their North London neighbours, Arsenal. Favourite league positions forever and a classy moment to depart this earth, you have to admit.

Andrew Palmer, executive director of ILC Sport from 2001-2009, and lifelong West Ham United fan, now cheering us on from his permanent season ticket seat in the sky.

Why the end of West Ham’s winning run in the Premier League might presage an FA Cup victory in May 2021

PLAYING THE WEMBLEY WAY

West Ham have won six games in a row in all competitions for the first time since January / February 2006. Perhaps it’s worth putting those achievements alongside these before we say farewell to this run, against the backdrop of the coldest UK January since 2011.

2005-06

7th January Norwich City FAC3 (A) 2-1
14th January Aston Villa (A) 2-1
23rd January Fulham (H) 2-1
28th January Blackburn Rovers FAC4 (H) 4-2
1st February Arsenal (A) 3-2
4th February Sunderland (H) 2-0
13th February Birmingham City (H) 3-0
18th February Bolton Wanderers FAC5 (A) 0-0

Yes, it was Bolton Wanderers who finally put an end to this run on 18th February in a 0-0 tie which West Ham won the home replay of 2-1, the following month. You may not need reminding that this was the last season West Ham reached an FA Cup Final, in May 2006, against Liverpool. Bolton Wanderers were also West Ham’s opponents in the first ever Wembley FA Cup Final in 1923, though like 2006, West Ham were the vanquished on that occasion.

The seven match winning run in 2006 featured within it West Ham’s final game at Highbury, the last game that Arsenal lost there, on that evening 3-2. This was the strange affair where Sol Campbell ‘disappeared’ at half-time after being routinely humiliated throughout the whole of the first half by Bobby Zamora, Matthew Etherington and Nigel Reo-Coker. This was the game when Thierry Henri became Arsenal’s top scorer of all time, a bitter sweet achievement on the night. This was the game in which new signing Dean Ashton came on for a brief debut cameo. The week before this Highbury hiatus came the 2-1 home victory over Fulham, an emotional send off occasion for Tomas Repka, a Czech player often sent off (5 reds, and 55 yellow cards) in his time at the club. In addition the 2-1 victory featured exquisite goals from Yossi Benayoun and Anton Ferdinand, either of which was a slam dunk contender for Premier League goal of that season.

West Ham’s young 44 year old manager was Alan Pardew, whose young side were fresh up from promotion the previous season, and enjoying the novelty of being new boys on the block for the first time since 1993. The goal heroes of that seven game winning run were Bobby Zamora with four and Dean Ashton, Matthew Etherington and Marlon Harewood with two. The Hammers’ goal heroes this time round are Tomas Soucek with 3 and 2 from Michail Antonio and Craig Dawson (the latter will eventually score another in this afternoon’s game).

So, West Ham still have Czech players in their line up who have both won over the hearts and minds of Hammers fans now denied the chance to see them in the flesh. In 2006, with the signing of Dean Ashton in the headlights, West Ham were wise in requesting that he not appear for their third round opponents Norwich City. Good planning, as it turns out, as he would score West Ham’s second FA Cup final goal at the Millennium (now ‘Principality’) Stadium, Cardiff, later that year. Hammers have signed on loan a Manchester United player, Jesse Lingard, one of whose only two appearances for his footballing alma mater this season was, unfortunately, in a scrappy 1-0 third round FA cup victory against Watford. The 2021 cup run in play that has the fans optimistic for a potential Wembley appearance at the end of the season will be without the services of the cup-tied Lingard. It’s also certain that it won’t be a repeat of the 2006 occasion, as Liverpool have already been knocked out by West Ham’s Round Five opponents, Manchester United. So is the West Ham United name on the FA Cup for 2021, or is it on the bullet of this afternoon’s fixture against Liverpool?

The first half of the Liverpool game has both sides cancelling each other out in a cautious, edgy 45 minutes, but in the second, after Michail Antonio hammers marginally wide, Mohammad Salah hits a sweet left-footed shot past Fabianski to put Liverpool ahead. Moyes brings Yarmolenko on for Fornals, but it’s from a corner aimed at the Ukrainian that Liverpool break with Shaqiri hitting a forty yard pass into the path of Salah who controls it deftly with his right foot before nudging it past Fabianski with his left. The Hammerati may well moan their arses off tonight on Twitter, but that’s brilliant. Even the Devil’s choice between the sticks would not have kept that out. Wijnaldum finishes off a late move past tired West Ham legs to make it 3-0, but Dawson keeps the score respectable with a late neat goal from a corner.

So that was West Ham’s silver bullet from an improving Liverpool. The only question that remains worth posing, is the fate of that fifth round tie a week or so away. I’ve already mentally traded this afternoon’s defeat for a result at Old Trafford. We know that seasons containing great runs often end with a bang, and this July Alan Pardew will celebrate his 60th birthday. What will David Moyes be celebrating for his 58th in April – a semi-final victory?

Martin Godleman

The Curse of ‘Hammer of the Year’

Monday 8th June 2020

West Ham fans are both a strange and unique bunch. The three Wembley years in the 1960s (1964, 1965 and 1966), three fabulous seasons in the 1980s (1979/80, 1980/81 and 1985/86) and three appearances at the Cardiff Municipal Stadium in 2004, 2005 and 2006 were all great times to be a West Ham United fan. However, the club’s real achievements have been few and isolated. Nevertheless, I would argue that this isn’t a club built on achievements, in the more narrow sense of the word. This is a club that at its core reflects a notion of football played in an entertaining way, of players whose appeal is in its team of individual spirits, a team for fans who are lovers of football beyond the simple win/lose with managers who strive to embrace all of these qualities in the way their West Ham teams play. They remain part of the identity of any football team. Not for nothing is the greatest damnation of any travelling fans, the chant ‘Your support is f**king shit!’

It is only recently, since the advent of the money-driven Premier League, that managers and players’ roles at the club have become more ephemeral. Success and survival in the football world have in the same period now become concepts that can be seen as mutually exclusive. Bury FC, a proud club founded in 1885, twice winning the FA Cup and once finishing 4th in the top league of English football, achieved promotion to the third tier in May 2019, undoubtedly a success, but their financial affairs were soon in jeopardy by the time August 2019 arrived, and as they couldn’t find a financial knight in shining armour, they were ‘wound up’ at the end of that month. A football club ‘wiped’ from the history of the Football League in just a few weeks. The fans of AFC Wimbledon have over twenty years managed to ‘resurrect’ their club from the dead, but whether the fans of Bury can do something similar remains to be seen.

The precarious position of football in a moneyed world has also had an effect on the players through the roles of agents, whose financial motivation may have them offer their employer advice that, whilst good in the long term for the player, may not sit very well with the fans, whose adulation has helped them establish their reputation. The lure of a ‘club with ambition’ (for ambition read money) may even turn the head of a loyal ‘up through the ranks’ player, as their agent gets in their ear about their ‘career’ and their ‘future’. Mark Noble in all likelihood may well be the last true loyal one club player at West Ham, as any fan faced with learning eight or nine new names at the beginning of every season will testify. Even the club manager is no longer guaranteed to be someone who will stay long enough for you to learn how to spell or pronounce their name. It has become increasingly hard to remain a loyal fan and not have your mental health to some extent impaired.

So we come to the curse of the ‘Hammer of the Year’ award, voted for at the end of every season since 1958 by the fans. This is the fans’ chance to have their opinions rewarded and reflected, purely and simply, and has historically been a no-go area for the cash flashers or those attempting to control the beautiful game by stealth. No, this is an award from the fans to the player who has been seen as exhibiting a loyalty, an effort and an unparalleled devotion to the club beyond any other in a given season. So how, you may ask, could it possibly be a curse, and if so, who for?

The answer to this question is easily found by reference to the roll call of recent winners of  the award. For the purpose of this article, I shall be referring to all those receiving the hallowed title since 1989. This is admittedly three years before the Premier League began, but comes at the end of the 1988-89 English football season, the first where every game was filmed, and where the dominant influence of money began to reveal its ugly carbuncled head.

Curse 1 – PAUL INCE. Check out Ince’s goal in the 1-0 away win at Millwall, the 1-0 victory at Aston Villa – possibly the greatest individual West Ham goal ever – and his two strikes against Liverpool in the League Cup Fourth Round game of November 1998. Like Steve Potts, Alvin Martin, Alan Dickens, George Parris, Stuart Slater and Kevin Keen (half a team in itself), Ince came from the Academy. A West Ham Boy. And (rightly so) he was rewarded by the fans for his excellent performances across that season by being voted Hammer of the Year. Unfortunately, at the end of the season, West Ham were relegated. Ince did nevertheless start the following season in a West Ham shirt, playing in the first game at Stoke on 19th August 1989, in a 1-1 draw, a game in which Frank McAvennie had his leg broken in a challenge with Stoke’s Chris Kamara. In the following game Ince was nowhere to be seen, his absence prompted by press speculation that he was to leave for Manchester United because of a Daily Express photograph that showed him posing in a Manchester United shirt before he had signed for them. The fans whose votes he took back in April were now calling for his head. Metaphorically speaking, of course. He would never win back their appreciation. I would argue that the fans suffered far more by his betrayal than Ince ever did. Just compare his record with that of the next list of winners – Julian Dicks (4 wins), Steve Potts (2 wins), Ludek Miklosko, and Trevor Morley – these four won the award over the next eight years, and proved to be loyal club servants. Then came the next curse for the fans…

Curse 2 – RIO FERDINAND. Another great Academy player, Rio rose up through the ranks in just three short years to be an England first choice, to help win the Inter-Toto Cup and to be part of a West Ham defence that almost managed to help record a positive goal difference at the end of the 1999-2000 season, something they hadn’t done since 1985-86 (it finished -1). So why the curse? Ferdinand was no Paul Ince. It is nevertheless my belief that but for the lure of money, Ferdinand would never have left West Ham. Rio loved and valued the fans, and therefore they let him go with good hearts, and cheered him when he came back to Upton Park for Leeds the following season. Frank Lampard, whose last game for West Ham was rather weirdly in that same game, didn’t do so well on departure, but then he was never Hammer of the Year. Somewhat less of a curse was the £18m West Ham got for Ferdinand, most of which ended up financing the new West Stand in 2001, sometimes referred to as the ‘Rio Stand’. [Curse of the Curse: In his second season at Leeds, Ferdinand was made captain and voted their ‘Player of the Year’ in May 2002. Two months later he joined Manchester United.]

Curse 3 – CARLOS TEVEZ. Curse? I hear you groan. This player saved us from relegation in the notorious 2006-07 season, the season of ‘The Great Escape’! Yes, I will reply, but remember that when he arrived, West Ham were riding high in the Premier League and coming off a 2006 FA Cup Final appearance that had so nearly ended in victory over a legendary Steve Gerrard Liverpool performance. Once Tevez joined the club (with the other unfit Argentinian, Javier Mascherano) West Ham set about losing seven games in a row without scoring, their worst run for many years. Tevez finally found his mojo seven months later in a 3-4 home defeat against Spurs, and then over the next nine matches, his seven goals and assists helped the Hammers avoid relegation on the very last day of the season, against Manchester United, scoring the vital goal that day. It was probably for these last nine appearances that the fans voted him ‘Hammer of the Year’ – maybe more out of relief than anything else. And guess what? He was on his way to Manchester United just two months later. West Ham survived, though I would also argue that we lost two managers over the affair, Alan Pardew and Alan Curbishley. Think about it.

Curse 4 – DIMITRI PAYET. Another footballing genius. Perhaps the greatest free-kick artist West Ham have ever had the good fortune to feature in a starting line-up. Where did he come from? Marseille, in June 2015, for maybe £10m. Who signed him? I’d like to give the credit for that to Slaven Bilic, but whoever it was, it was a great signing. Payet was 28, so not exactly young, but his performances in West Ham’s excellent 2015-16 season certainly made us all feel that we had a very special player on the books. It was therefore no surprise when Payet was voted 2016 ‘Hammer of the Year’. So what happened? The following season (2016-17) was the first at London Stadium and Payet featured well in the early games, the rabona cross against Watford that Michail Antonio headed home from was sublime, and the goal against Middlesbrough a few weeks later when he went past five defenders before slotting home… they were both wonderful moments. Just eight weeks later though, in January 2018, Slaven Bilic announced that Dimitri Payet no longer wanted to play for the club. 60 appearances and 15 goals as well as countless assists. Where did he go back to? Marseille. And under a cloud. It was never explained exactly why he didn’t want to play for West Ham anymore but the fans understandably reached their own conclusions. Payet’s name was airbrushed almost immediately from West Ham history like an unseated statue. Perhaps one day he will give the full explanation that those of us who were saddened by his departure really crave.

Curse 5 – MARKO ARNAUTOVIC. Strong, determined, committed, brave… Arnautovic was all of those things. He didn’t seem to get on too well initially with Slaven Bilic, but he felt himself to be a natural centre-forward and didn’t like playing on the left and chasing back. The fans took time to get to like him – he wasn’t an instant fit. Signed for £20m he made his debut at Manchester United with little to detail in a 0-4 defeat, and in his second game at Southampton he was sent off for elbowing Jack Stephens in a narrower 2-3 reverse. On the arrival of David Moyes after Bilic had left, Arnautovic was given his second chance, and this time in the preferred target man position. He scored the only goal in a 1-0 win over Chelsea, and followed that with a goal against his previous club Stoke City in a 3-0 victory. He managed in all to total eleven for the season in 35 appearances and was voted ‘Hammer of the Year’ for 2018. This is where the curse gets interesting just two years after Payet, as by January 2019, Arnautovic too was declaring that he no longer wanted to play for the club. He had apparently been approached with a lucrative transfer offer from a Chinese club, Shanghai SIPG. By now his manager was Manuel Pellegrini, but the discomfort was the same. In the end Arnautovic stayed, but he left to play in the Chinese Premier League in July. Whilst his departure wasn’t as lamented as Payet’s, the notion of not wanting to play for the club, with seemingly only the cash as the reason, left a bad taste with the fans. With 22 goals in 65 games, it was disappointing to see the back of him so soon.

Curse 6 – LUCASZ FABIANSKI. Surely the curse does not extend to Fabianski? A brilliant goalkeeper whose expertise was a key part in keeping his side Swansea City in the top flight for four successive seasons. Once he’d signed for West Ham in June 2018 for £7m, he quickly settled in to become Hammers’ number one. So much so that in 2019 Fabianski was voted ‘Hammer of the Year,’ the first goalkeeper to get the award since Robert Green in 2008, 11 years earlier (though Adrián was runner-up in both 2014 and 2015). Here’s where the curse might apply: in the current season, following the award, Fabianski’s injury against Bournemouth in September 2019 (when West Ham were 5th in the League) was perhaps the cause of why the team have struggled so much this season. Hammers lost eight of the eleven games following Fabianski’s injury, and struggled unexpectedly with the disappointing form of first reserve keeper Roberto. They have been forced across the season to start games with no less than four different goalkeepers. That hasn’t happened for a long while. By the time Fabianski returned at the end of the year against Leicester City, West Ham were 17th, and hovering just outside the relegation zone. Two weeks later he was injured again, and Hammers lost two out of three of their next games, picking up just one point. As we head for nine games behind closed doors to complete the delayed 2019/20 season, there will be those who hope ‘the curse’ won’t ring true for the last three years in four, and that the 2019 ‘Hammer of the Year’ stays fit.

So whatever happens for the rest of this season, think very carefully before deciding who you vote for to be your 2020 ‘Hammer of the Year’.

Missing The Great Escape

MISSING THE GREAT ESCAPE

Saturday 11th May 2003

As the West Ham 2002-03 season drew to a nail-biting close, it was clear that the club’s end of season video was going to be a thing of beauty, or a DVD (we were releasing it on both formats) to simply make up the numbers in the devoted fan’s WHU Library collection. I had been involved in producing the end of season programme for the club since 1998-99, and with Hammers in the bottom three of the Premier League, the company financing the product were becoming understandably nervous.

I had somehow managed to persuade my boss that the miracle was possible (I’ve been a fan since 1970), and that we should make preparations for a ‘Great Escape’ video that could prove one of our best-selling titles ever. In late April, with the club still looking odds-on for the drop, we hired Tony Cottee for a day and I wrote a script to accommodate both endings for the club that the season would potentially produce. Tony is of course West Ham royalty and a consummate professional, and was the perfect choice to ‘host’ such a show.

Glenn Roeder, the rookie manager, had taken Harry Redknapp’s side to the dizzy heights of seventh in his first season, but had followed it with a spectacularly disappointing ‘difficult second album’ year. Well-publicised fallouts with Paolo Di Canio and the promotion of the young Joe Cole to captain were two Roeder moments that changed the effectiveness of the side. The loss of striker Fredi Kanouté early in the season also hadn’t helped, not to mention the loss of expensive signing goalkeeper David James, before he’d even played a game for the Hammers.

Despite the creeping feeling of despair, our end of season programme already had a couple of exclusive moments in the can that we could include. I had persuaded the company to set up an extra camera at home games so we would be ready to interview anyone of interest who’d been at the game and raise the quality of a potential Great Escape video even further. Thankfully we were relying on one of the real stars behind the scenes at Upton Park, Sue Page, who dealt with that side of things, and she didn’t let us down.

After the 2-2 home draw with Aston Villa in April, Sue brought David Essex in to chat with us in the interview room. For the younger fans out there, Essex is a very successful English singer / songwriter. In the 1970s he had 19 Top 40 singles in the UK (including two number ones) and 16 Top 40 albums. He has also had an extensive career as an actor. Google him. Not only that, but he is a really devoted fan who has many connections with the club, as you’ll see. Essex. Geddit?

To start the interview I asked whether coming to Upton Park was still a regular activity for him.

“It is. It’s very nerve-wracking,” he replied. “I’ve been coming here since I was four, which is nearly 100 years ago. They’ve always been the same. West Ham are consistent in their inconsistency. It’s been a mysterious season really because against Arsenal at home they were superb. 2-1 up and about to take a penalty and then it all drifted away. Looking at the team today you wonder why. For the last eight games they’ve matched every team they’ve played, and the position they’re in… it’s a bit of a mystery really.

“I still feel positive. I think we’ll stay up. It’s an old thing – ‘we’re too good to go down’ – but we do still have to play Bolton Wanderers and Birmingham City and those matches will be pivotal to staying in the Premier League. If we do go down, though, I don’t think we can really complain because you look at the commitment and can see that people out there are trying to play football and stay up. What slightly worries me is that with the kind of players we’ve got who have terrific touch and who are good footballers… If we do get relegated then I just wonder how long it’ll be before we come back up.”

“Who were your heroes when you were a boy?” I asked him.

“I was lucky enough to play for West Ham Boys, so I was here from when I was just a 10-year old. In those days it was John Dick and Vic Keeble up front. They had a winger called Doug Wragg who all the dockers called ‘Oily’, and it was wonderful. Upton Park was all standing then, of course, and if you came in late as a little boy the dockers would pass you down to the front. They’d leave you there so you could see the game.

“There is solid support for West Ham throughout the world. I remember touring in Australia last year and we had a great big Hell’s Angel roadie who was West Ham United through and through. When I got back I sent him a shirt, and he’s proudly walking round Melbourne wearing it. We’re loved worldwide.

“This has always been a terrific club, very friendly and a real family set-up. To be part of it as a schoolboy was wonderful. I’ve got twin sons who are now at the Academy as well, so if you cut my veins they’ll bleed claret and blue. Seeing West Ham do well is as important to me and well on a par with my OBE, the sell-out concerts and hit records.

“It’s hard to pick one all-time Hammer, though. Looking back, I remember the great partnership of Keeble and Dick in 1959-60. Tony Cottee was a tremendous player, and so was Alvin Martin. Then Bobby Moore, of course, and now Joe Cole. I think Cole has been exemplary this season in the way he’s led the team and shown his commitment.

“Paolo Di Canio is a wonderful player, too. Personally I wish he was staying here because he can change a game. People criticise him and I don’t know what goes on in the changing-rooms, but as far as I’m concerned, out on the pitch he’s an extraordinary player and he seems to be committed to West Ham and you can’t really fault that.

“This club has had some marvellous players down the years and they’ve always had that reputation for playing football. Even when I was here as a little boy you never hoofed it up the pitch. You tried to play it out of defence. Nerve-wracking, yes, but it’s a style of football, and it’s great to watch. And we dream on.”

Leaving the actual shoot with Tony Cottee until Friday May 2nd, which was as late as we dared, I met Tony at Canary Wharf where we filmed a few links from the rooftop with its incredible views over London. We had decided in the main to couch the shoot positively and hope that the club would manage a ‘fabulous finish’ to escape the dreaded relegation in a season that, but for a few crumbs of joy, had covered a lamentably miserable ten months, with the first league home win only coming at the end of January.

We spent the day at different key West Ham sites such as the World Cup 1966 statue of Moore, Hurst, Peters and Wilson in the Barking Road, the notorious Cassettari’s café, where the players would often congregate before and after matches in the 50s and the 60s, and the new Club Museum back at the Boleyn Ground.

Thanks to an inspired piece of architectural planning, West Ham’s stadium corporate boxes then doubled as hotel rooms during the week, and it was in one of these that we shot the alternate stay up/go down closing scenes for the video with Cottee, as he ‘woke up’ in the hotel room in his West Ham United dressing gown, pulling back the curtains to reveal a panoramic view of the pitch, in front of which he pontificated on the what ifs or the thank Gods, depending on how the season ended. For this final scene, we had borrowed one of the many items of West Ham night wear on sale, which Cottee tried on in the club shop.

As TC posed at the entrance to the club museum, I attempted to wind him up by remarking on how much he looked like Noel Coward.

‘Who’s Noel Coward?’ he asked, perhaps not unreasonably.

‘You don’t know who Noel Coward is?’ the cameraman said, with genuine surprise.

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘Just get him lined up in front of that picture of Trevor Brooking.’ The cameraman looked at me, a little confused.

‘Who’s Trevor Brooking?’ he said.

Horses. Courses.

After a couple of days’ filming, we had nearly two hours of material that made it certain our end of season programme would contain footage worth watching in addition to the five or six decent games West Ham could offer from throughout the season to date, whether they were relegated or stayed up. I was determined that we would make a good programme out of a bad season, and we had that David Essex interview.

But events overtook us.

Roeder collapsed with an operable brain tumour on Easter Monday and Trevor Brooking stood in as ‘caretaker’, but despite his motivational efforts at management in the closing weeks of the season, survival proved elusive.

On Sunday May 11th 2003, after a 2-2 draw at Birmingham City had earned Hammers their 42nd point, West Ham United were relegated from the FA Carling Premier League.

The DVD we finally produced, which you may well have a copy of, turned out to be very different to the one I had been imagining. My boss decided that no fan would want to watch two hours of disappointing defeats, so he unilaterally limited the seasons review to include extended highlights of just the games where the team had won or played well.

This was also the time when football coverage was moving from aspect ratios of 4:3 to 16:9 (look it up), and to complete this absolute dog’s breakfast, the editor decided to produce a programme in the short-lived ‘letter box’ format, reducing the final quality of the picture. Beyond belief? Of course, but perfectly in keeping with managing to somehow get one of the arguably best squads we have ever had at the club relegated. I managed to rescue some quality at the last moment by begging them to include, as a bonus feature, all the goals the club had scored that season. A pyrrhic victory, yes, but as you watch them now, you can at least see the quality evaporating before your very eyes.

The sequel to this very strange season came in the writing of Our Days Are Few. But that is, quite lidderally, another story for another day.

And website.

West Ham United’s Leap Year Day

Saturday 29th February 2020

If you were asked just how many games West Ham have played on February 29th since their inception in 1900, you would soon realise that it couldn’t be that many. Today would be the thirtieth such potential fixture since that time, but then prior to the advent of the Premier League in 1992, games were generally only played on Saturdays, with cup replays and the odd postponed fixtures in midweek, so a scheduled game on that day is always going to be a rare event. Thames Ironworks did manage one such fixture on Saturday February 29th 1896, when the Irons were beaten 4-2 away at Reading.

FA Cup Quarter Final Saturday February 29th 1964
West Ham 3 Burnley 2

This is the fixture that remains to date West Ham’s only victory on Leap Year Day, and it was one to remember for the club. 36, 651 fans crammed into Upton Park for their second successive FA Cup Quarter Final, the previous season’s effort heralding elimination at the sixth round stage 1-0 at Anfield by Liverpool. A home tie raised more hope this time round, and Ron Greenwood fielded the same eleven players who would feature in every tie throughout the club’s successful FA Cup run that year: Standen, Bond, Burkett, Bovington, Brown, Moore, Brabrook, Boyce, Byrne, Hurst and Sissons.

Burnley were in their heyday, having won the league in 1960, finishing fourth, second and third in the three years following, so would be offering sterner opposition than Charlton, Leyton Orient and Swindon Town had posed in the previous three rounds. Burnley’s John Connelly gave his side the lead in the thirteenth minute with a brilliant run, evading three tackles as he sped through on goal, firing into the corner past Jim Standen. West Ham struggled throughout the first half, and were flattered by the score at half-time. The second half was a different matter however, and John Sissons, a pre-match guest at our last home game v Brighton, sent over a long dipping cross in the 57th minute that beat Blacklaw, leaving just Elder defending on the line who could only help it into the net. The equaliser fired the Hammers into an all out assault, and just three minutes later Johnny Byrne finished off a superb four man move that he had begun, involving Moore, Hurst and Brabrook, finishing with a powerful volley from the edge of the area to give Hammers the lead for the first time in the tie. Byrne scored his second and West Ham’s third eight minutes later, rounding the keeper with a controversial finish after an alleged earlier foul on Miller. Burnley pulled one back ten minutes from time, but it was only a consolation as Hammers stormed into their first FA Cup semi-final for 31 years.

The other four fixtures West Ham have played on Leap Year Day were not as successful, the club failing to score in any of them. Only one of those four games was at home, in 1992, against Everton, for whom Tony Cottee played that day. As the team take the field today to face Southampton, they can take some hope from the fact that this is their first ever Leap Year Day Premier League fixture, and all records are made and set to be broken.

Previous Leap Year Day League Clashes

Saturday February 29th 1908 Brentford 4 West Ham United 0
Saturday February 29th 1936 Burnley 1 West Ham United 0
Tuesday February 29th 1972 Sheffield United 3 West Ham United 0
Saturday February 29th 1992 West Ham United 0 Everton 2
Saturday February 29th 2020 West Ham United v Southampton

So no goals on this day, no points, no success. This season West Ham play Southampton at home on Saturday February 29th, but they have only played three other games on this leap year day in the last seventy years, all of them as a top flight club, but none as a Premier League team.

West Ham are eighteenth in the Premier League, in the relegation zone, and needing urgently to win especially as they only have recorded one success at home in 2020 which was the 4-0 New Year Day’s victory over Bournemouth. Curiously, just like their last home game on February 29th in 1992, there are protests against the Board outside the ground before kick off, but although a few thousand congregate, it is a protest that for the moment seems consigned to outside. These affairs seem to last as long as it takes the side to score a decent comfortable victory. The 1991-92 side were eventually relegated from the last ever First Division. Maybe today’s Premier League fixture will be one with a different ending.

Jarrod Bowen, West Ham’s £18m striker, makes his first start, and after just twelve minutes, Bowen starts to make the money look well spent with a powerful shot which James Ward-Prowse does well to block for a corner. Two minutes later Pablo Fornals pounces on a poor clearance and slides Bowen through for a deliciously expert finish to put the Hammers ahead on his debut.

Southampton who haven’t really been in the game at all up to this point, snatch an equaliser on the half hour from Michael Obafemi, who expertly chips Ward-Prowse’s cross over Fabianski for an intelligent finish.

West Ham take the lead again with an odd goal, perfect for a game played on February 29th. Sébastien Haller plays a neat pass to Antonio who hits in a looping cross for which Haller and McCarthy challenge. You’ve seen these a hunded times. It always ends with the goalkeeper punching the ball cleanly away. Except this time McCarthy decides he’s going to catch it, and his flailing hands are no match for Haller’s jump, and he heads the ball clear of the keeper and lithely connects with it at the far post – his own assist – to restore West Ham’s lead.

The second half is a little less frenetic, and West Ham add to their lead ten minutes after the restart when a neat back header from Haller allows Fornals the chance to play Antonio through, and he finishes with a powerful right foot shot past McCarthy. 3-1. On the hour Antonio has the chance to score a second after a cheeky rabona from Haller, but this time McCarthy manages to get something on it to divert it inches wide. Hammers ended the week with their first league goals and league points ever recorded on a February 29th. The next one that falls on a Saturday is in 2048. Put it in your diary now.