Imagine your neighbour collects cars. Not just any cars either – Bugattis and vintage F1 models and monster trucks which could do enough donuts to make a shadow vomit.
It could, in the right hands, be among the most exciting vehicular assortments in the country. Except, unfortunately, your neighbour is morally opposed to breaking the speed limit or driving off road.
He wears a helmet and elbow pads when he drives at night. He’s got a former Le Mans winner which only ever goes to Morrisons. Your neighbour is Julen Lopetegui.
This may seem an overreaction given the Spaniard has overseen four Premier League matches at West Ham, but there’s something agonisingly tragic about witnessing the potential joy being wasted.
Against Fulham, West Ham had just three shots on target and were bailed out by Danny Ings’s second competitive goal since February 2023. They were incoherent and inconsistent and incomplete, 11 men only vaguely aware they’re on the same team.
Michail Antonio, long the benchmark for attacking consistency in east London, didn’t manage a shot or a dribble in his 45 minutes on the pitch, hooked for Crysencio Summerville having lost possession more than once every four minutes.
Antonio has been one of West Ham’s greatest modern players, yet has also never beaten 10 Premier League goals in any season even at his best. He has averaged as many shots per game in 2024-25 as Casemiro and Kyle Walker-Peters. Now 34, this is clearly not his best.
The part-time podcaster was selected in front of Tomas Soucek, one of three defensive midfielders selected in a clear statement of Lopetegui’s intention.
Most teams would find two of Soucek, Edson Alvarez and Guido Rodriguez over-cautious. All three, at Lucas Paqueta’s expense, is so conservative you half expected Jacob Rees-Mogg to turn up on the right wing.
Mohammed Kudus is among the most euphoric footballers in England, capable of doing anything he sets his mind to, a selection box of freewheeling invention matched by brutal power. That he could now be combined with Crysencio Summerville, Jarrod Bowen, Paqueta and Carlos Soler should be a sumptuous treat, fusion jazz rather than the dirge fans witnessed at Craven Cottage.
That Ings scored a minute from the final whistle risks papering over what was otherwise an exhibition of footballing tepidity against a Fulham side who also weren’t at their best.
Niclas Fullkrug is yet to start a Premier League game and was ruled out on Saturday due to injury, yet it’s hard to see how he instantly improves this attack. While Antonio was not good, he wasn’t the root cause of West Ham’s issues. It’s not as though Bowen and Kudus were creating chance after chance which weren’t being converted.
While Lopetegui’s record at Sevilla was excellent, both in La Liga and in Europe, his teams have rarely been free-flowing. His Wolves side managed just 28 goals across 27 games and even in Seville he still only averaged 1.45 goals per game.
Over four league matches under Lopetegui, West Ham have managed the second-fewest shots on target per match, only ahead of Ipswich. Their xG is 5.65 – above the four they’ve actually scored, including a penalty and an own goal. This suggests some level of poor luck, but on the basis of the Fulham performance it’s hard not to think they were lucky to score at all.
It’s easy to make gags about replacing David Moyes with his Spanish equivalent, but Moyes’s success and impact was undeniable. Fans tired of defensive football but it was always fairly simple to justify that the occasional frustration and boredom justified the results, until it didn’t.
But more than £150m was spent this summer, undeniably giving West Ham a squad capable of European qualification and, perhaps more pertinently, capable of inspiring overwhelming joy. Unless Lopetegui starts living up to one of those benchmarks sooner rather than later, starts using his supercars as they were intended, he could be doomed before he’s really begun.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/njr2Bxi
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