BOWEN’S BULLSEYE
West Ham 3 Watford 1
This game sees Mark Noble’s 500th competitive appearance for West Ham, making him only the tenth ever Hammer to register this career stat. The previous player to achieve this was Steve Potts, who managed 505, back in 2002. Aaron Cresswell, with 211 appearances is the closest to Noble in appearances from the current squad, but Noble has only ever played for West Ham. It’s safe to say that he will probably be the last ever player in our lifetimes to register this magnificent achievement.
Watford will always be remembered for being the first away Premier League team to set out to play creative attacking football against West Ham at their new ground in September 2016. Turning a 0-2 deficit into a comfortable 4-2 victory, they were also the first away side to win at London Stadium in its new footballing livery. Deeney and Antonio, both scorers on that day, have four years on still been hitting the net regularly for their respective sides.
Tonight the teams don’t have the comfortable backdrop of early season experiment, facing their genuine do or die, stay up or go down moment. Should either side win this game they are virtually safe from the terror of relegation. David Sullivan declared earlier this year that it would be unthinkable financially for West Ham to suffer the drop to the Championship.
He wasn’t kidding.
With the advent of lockdown nipping at their heels back in February, Nigel Pearson’s Watford side beat Liverpool 3-0. Klopp’s side hadn’t at that point lost all season and had not been beaten in the league for 422 days. The two and a half month layoff has taken away something of Pearson’s magic touch, replacing it with an all too familiar early season panic. Watford have brought a squad of officials into West Ham’s BCD’s red zone larger than any other so far, to the extent that it creates a boisterous support worthy of a small travelling bunch of supporters, which of course they are. They all cheer the side on when they come on to the pitch. After ten minutes of the game however, the fan squad is effectively silenced.
As in the game from September 2016, West Ham race swiftly into a two goal lead, a close range finish by Antonio, his ninth of the season, preceding another Soucek header from another bullseye Bowen cross. The speed and efficiency of the goals seem to mock West Ham’s precarious position in the table. Watford have no answer and are further blunted when Declan Rice hits a dipping shot in from 25 yards past Ben Foster. There is an almost anti-climatic savagery to this goal glut, tempered only by the fact that they score no more before half time.
In the second half Watford are pulled up by the scruff of their respective necks thanks to a major effort by the untiring Deeney, and a minute after Kabasele’s header from a corner misses the target by a matter of inches, Deeney strokes home, after Decouré’s effort has come back off the post. Three minutes into the second half, this is, one imagines, just what they need. But this time it doesn’t happen for Pearson, as indicated when he substitutes Deeney after 20 further minutes to save him for the final two games against Manchester City and Arsenal. This is perhaps defeatist with plenty of time left, as it’s not like he’s bringing on John Barnes.
Fanciful Watford fans who remember Pearson’s heroics keeping Leicester City up at the end of the 2014-15 season, must have been preparing to lay out a few bob for their side to win the league in 2021. Even the revelation of a stash of Watford away fan crowd noises in stacks of homes watching live across Hertsmere cannot summon a goal or an error from the Hammers’ resolute defence. All that remains worthy of note from here on in is the fact that, duplicating his appearance off the subs’ bench again Chelsea, Haller almost scores with his first touch, chipping Foster from 25 yards, the ball bouncing just inches wide thanks to a last second’s left paw away from the Watford keeper.
This is when I start to think about the season as a whole, now we seem to have escaped punishment for its worst excesses. It started with Pellegrini – remember him? It seems a lifetime ago that his unsmiling eyes took in the horror developing before him after Fabianski’s injury at Bournemouth. Hammers were fifth in the table after that game, but by the time the 2019 Hammer of the Year returned between the sticks ten weeks later, West Ham were 17th. After this win, West Ham are now 15th, their highest position in the league since the December away win at Southampton. Back then, just two defeats later, Pellegrini carried the can and something approaching a £10m pay off to leave London Stadium.
So what can we conclude from all of these ruminations?
Let’s see how West Ham perform at Old Trafford next Wednesday, at Moyes’ former home-from-home. Manager of Manchester United was the kind of job Moyes must have dreamed of when his stock was high at Goodison Park, but it was a seat he occupied for just 296 days. In spite of the £5m pay-off, the spirit of the man must have been momentarily crushed. He’s already been manager at London Stadium over two reigns for substantially more than that, though much of it has been spent in lockdown. The measure of his appetite for the West Ham job can, for me, be ascertained by how important he feels it is for him to get a result at Old Trafford, even with Hammers safe from relegation. A win or a mere point would represent the promise of a considerably longer stay in post this time.
1 Lucasz Fabianski, 3 Aaron Cresswell, 23 Issa Diop, 21 Angelo Ogbonna, 53 Ben Johnson, 41 Declan Rice, 16 Mark Noble (captain), 28 Tomas Soucek, 17 Jarrod Bowen, 18 Pablo Fornals, 30 Michail Antonio
Substitutes: 22 Sébastien Haller, 4 Fabian Balbuena, 7 Andriy Yarmolenko
Scorers: 30 Michail Antonio, 28 Tomas Soucek, 41 Declan Rice
