WEST HAM (AWAY)
West Ham away, happy hunting ground and all that. Let’s hope we don’t grind out an ugly 1.0 win… our Graham booing his own team off the pitch would be an unedifying spectacle.
Here’s Ed Woodhouse’s take on the game...
West Ham (a) memories: our first away victory in the Premier League, two elegies on our chronic inability to hold onto leads, the scene of Glenn Murray’s final goal in blue and white. On Wednesday we defend our deeply Brightonian unbeaten PL record (W1 D3) at West Ham feeling full of either flakey optimism or Man In The Pub style ‘realism’.
It’s been said before but it’s worth repeating what an odd setting the ‘wink wink, we’ll sort something out re rent just between me you and the gatepost’ Stadium is. That said, the space between the upper and lower parts of the stand is such that they could use it to put on a fully staged opera mid-game should they so wish. Most IIIIRRRONS fans would probably have welcomed this confusing juxtaposition a couple of years ago.
Speaking of which, our moniker last season as the “all-passing, no-scoring performance art project” appears to be making a bit of a comeback. One day the stats men and footballing artistes will take over and football matches won’t be decided by such trivial metrics as goals scored. However, until this happens, you feel we might consider putting the ball in the actual net the odd time.
Saturday featured more glaring misses than the aftermath of a stag party. There were two pretty bad ones from Neal Maupay, a couple of jarring smacks off the post and an effort from Jacob Moder that didn’t portray a willingness to score but more a need to win the argument.
As bad as Leeds were, we did play well, did dominate the game and very much did nearly concede a late winner as would have happened last year. The build up from the back was good, including some charging forward into midfield from Lewis Dunk and Adam Webster, often leaving us approaching the final third with extra men. But then, again, the post-modernist panic began to kick in and we seemed to inject artificial elements of difficulty into the act of scoring a goal.
Do we need a striker or do we need the one we had banging them in at the start of the season? West Ham seem to do alright with just the one on their books.
Wednesday will be an interesting game for the neutral, as most of our fixtures are these days. The ‘oh look, Virgo at right wing’ fatalism that will probably never leave me means that home games against winless Newcastle and struggling Leeds worry me more than West Ham away. They’ve had a tough run recently, and, after making Liverpool’s manager cry about losing (hard to believe, I know) a few weeks ago, subsequent defeats have unfortunately ruled out any title-winning shenanigans.
I think we might be in this game. A creditable score-draw - numerically similar to the past two encounters but with less relegation dread attached - would be good. Lamptey and Cucurella cooking on gas, Trossard a peroxide evolution of last year’s model and the absolute flex that is fielding a player with shirt number 60. Bringing Adam Lallana back into the centre of midfield might be an idea, Shane Duffy could be useful for winning some headers, and Jacob Moder’s direct running and aerial presence could be of good use to us. Let’s have it!