WHAT A SEASONING IT’S BEEN
West Ham 3 Southampton 0
The season finale for West Ham provides a delicious double of welcoming the fans back and the spectacle of Europa League group stage qualification, if they can muster a point from this final fixture.
Ralph Schadenfreude’s Southampton have spent some of the early part of this season at the summit of the Premier League table, but an inconsistent last few months have sent them tumbling down to the lower positions in the hierarchy.
West Ham’s capacious ground has facilitated the chance to let 10,000 fans in for this game, and the club has managed to spread them across the stadium so they are able potentially – if the Hammers’ performance merits it – to expand their lung power to the factor of six and simulate a full attendance. Of course anyone who has sat through some of the games here over the last five years will know that if they all cheer at once in any part of the game, that should create the atmosphere that a 60,000 crowd here would ordinarily achieve. West Ham fans at the London Stadium have had very little to cheer about, other than the peppercorn rent they have to cough up for playing there. Now they have put together some decent performances over the season, it is somewhat ironic that nobody has been there to watch. Sadly, there may be a correlation between these two facts. We will only know if that is the case next season, but for now 10,000 Hammers’ fans can celebrate their team’s greatest season for 20 years in its last throes.
Over the season West Ham scored three goals in successive games against Arsenal, Wolves and Leicester, but in conceding seven, they sacrificed two of the nine points at stake. Today they are to score three again, as they did again in the week against West Bromwich Albion, but this time without reply.
Pablo Fornals, a solid and tricky thinking midfielder with a football brain capable of providing thrilling passes and threaded moves, has had a claim on Hammer of the Year for this season for his assists and goals. Today he turns opportunist in the box to score two in three minutes on the half hour, both predatory, both clinical. The goals more or less put to bed a game that Southampton had participated in with equal aplomb, Nathan Redmond, Stuart Armstrong and Ibrahima Diallo all going close in the first 25 minutes of the game. With Ogbonna, Dawson, Cresswell and Coufal all providing cover for each other, there is no way through for the Sainted strikers in their blood red livery, and at half time Hammers are perhaps a tiny bit flattered by the scoreline.
This is not the case in the second half, where the flair of Lingard and Bowen begins to tell and Hammers start to create more chances, the last of which sees Declan Rice running through on the left to score a third just four minutes from time.
This was West Ham’s fifth season at London Stadium and their final league positions for the five year tenure so far have been 11th, 13th, 10th, 16th and now 6th, best of all. People laughed (mainly West Ham fans) when David Sullivan said the club’s new ground would be perfect to host European Champions League football. The final table shows that they were in the end just three points short of doing that. A draw against Chelsea last month would have done it. To imagine the chance gone is to lack imagination. Next season the aim should be to close the gap on those three points and by more than just three. And remember Moyes’ first press conference when he declared, ‘That’s what I do, I win.’ There were a few Hammers’ lifers who put their heads in their hands in preparation for more big words gone bad, but in 2020/21 West Ham won 19 of their 38 league games. That’s 57 points, and 65 overall with the 8 draws.
1 Lucasz Fabianski, 15 Craig Dawson, 3 Aaron Cresswell, 5 Vladimir Coufal, 21 Angelo Ogbonna, 41 Declan Rice (Captain), 28 Tomas Souček, 20 Jarrod Bowen, 18 Pablo Fornals, 11 Jesse Lingard, 30 Michail Antonio
Substitutes: 9 Saïd Benrahma, 16 Mark Noble, 23 Issa Diop
Scorers: Pablo Fornals (2), Declan Rice
