West Ham 1 Wolverhampton 0
BIRTHDAY BOY
This was always going to be a heart in mouth moment for the West Ham faithful, who look anxiously as the team take to the field with their Yarmolenko training tops and blue and yellow focus.
Minus Ogbonna this looks like a full strength side facing the West Midlanders’ starkly stingy defence, and with Hammers not scoring too many at home in the last couple of games, making the first strike looks an essential bag. At Molineux in an unexpected 1-0 defeat earlier in the season, Hammers’ initial cavalier confidence seemed to subside somewhat. Now is the chance to rekindle it, and with an FA Cup last sixteen tie on Wednesday and a Europa League knockout fixture a week later, Hammers desperately now need to occupy a page in the current form book.
Wolves are the team to have already started the doubts that this season might not yield the Champions League place the Hammers had hoped for back in November, when they beat them with the recovering and returning Jiménez, whose solo goal proved the only strike of the game. Today Wolves can move ahead of the Hammers if they can complete the double over them.
Rice carries Yarmolenko’s shirt to signify support for the absent Ukranian and his country, and the atmosphere in the ground is both sympathetic and determined. Lanzini replaces Benrahma in their alternate formation of recent weeks.
When Johnson is felled outside the Wolves’ area, Cresswell hits in a powerful effort that has the keeper stretching out to grab at thin air. Antonio is powerful in the last third and is unlucky not to have a hat-trick by half time, though the closest Hammers come to in the first half is five minutes before half time when Rice’s brilliant twenty-five yard effort comes back off the post with the goalkeeper again beaten.
Hammers haven’t won in their last five games, so when they do finally score it is celebrated perhaps more with relief than genuine joy. Fornals feels he is fouled on the left, but gaining only a throw he finds Cresswell, whose ball through to Antonio behind the Wolves’ defence creates a gap, and his cross is gratefully steered home by birthday boy Tomas Souček, wearing 28 but 27 on this 27th day of February, his first goal for the Hammers since December. It may not be as breathtaking as Rice’s effort from the first half would have been if it had curled another six inches from the target, but it is a goal, and the strike that eventually wins the game in a tightly-fought contest that sees West Ham put some distance between them and their Black Country neighbours.
1 Lucasz Fabianski, 3 Aaron Cresswell, 4 Kurt Zouma, 31 Ben Johnson, 41 Declan Rice (c), 15 Craig Dawson, 8 Pablo Fornals, 10 Manuel Lanzini, 28 Tomas Souček, 9 Michail Antonio, 20 Jarrod Bowen
Substitutes:, 11 Nikola Vlašić, 23 Issa Diop
Goalscorer: Tomas Souček
