SHIT SHAPE
Bristol City 1 West Ham 0
A fourth round tie with Blackpool or Nottingham Forest lies in wait for the winner of this tie, that I am watching on a screen in a hotel lounge in Marrakesh. My host has found a bottle of champagne in his office. Its contents are warm, but it’s nothing that a few ice cubes he’s grabbed from a nearby freezer cannot cure. Whether West Ham’s injury issues and African Cup of Nations player absences can be so easily plastered over is another matter.
Danny Ings, Aaron Cresswell and Maxwel Cornet all start, so there is an immediate hope that no one else in the side will display even a hint of a below par performance. Bristol City played and lost at the weekend, whereas what is left of the West Ham team hasn’t kicked a ball in anger in the last eight days.
And West Ham almost go ahead in the second minute as Ings is poised to take a ball from Cornet where he would be straight through, but Cornet overhits the pass and from the break away Mavropanos hits a weak back pass to Fabianski, duplicating his error against Crystal Palace, and Tommy Conway pokes it past the keeper and finishes off from a tight angle. This is the striker who scored at London Stadium, so he must like the claret and blue. Actually just blue tonight. That pigment blue that Yves Klein made his own all those years ago.
Each replay, and there are several, makes Mavropanos’ back pass look worse. I am immediately filled with a sown dread that this is the only goal of the game.
1 Lucasz Fabianski, 3 Aaron Cresswell, 4 Kurt Zouma (captain), 5 Vladimir Coufal, 33 Emerson, 15 Konstantinos Mavropanos, 22 Saïd Benrahma, 7 James Ward-Prowse, 28 Tomas Souček, 14 Maxwel Cornet, 18 Danny Ings
Substitutes: 45 Divin Mubama, 2 Ben Johnson, 50 Callum Marshall
