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’.
