West Ham 1-2 Crystal Palace (Bowen 49’ | Mateta 37’, Mitchell 68’)
LONDON STADIUM — The Graham Potter experiment looks increasingly like somebody in the boardroom swallowed a textbook on what modern chairmen want when the decision was made. The result: a club in disarray and a manager plunged into a bleak, uncertain hinterland. It is hard to see how he survives; less still, where he goes from here.
From the beginning there was a hint of co-dependency about this appointment. Potter needed this to work as badly as West Ham did. David Sullivan will no doubt lurch in the opposite direction now and both he and Karren Brady deserve every ounce of scrutiny they receive for it.
But whether it is to be Nuno Esperito Santo, Slaven Bilic, or someone else entirely, at least they have options. For Potter, the last nine months have been damning, at the helm of a team for whom relegation might just be the kindest thing. Certainly, it is the vehicle most likely to enact change.
The thousands who marched against the board before kick-off against Crystal Palace were spot on in their diagnosis. Still, when many joined in with a chorus of sacked in the morning it felt like the end for a coach who once had the world at his feet. That reputation has been trashed by two disastrous career moves in a row.
Potter is not totally impervious to change. Mads Hermansen was out, Alphonse Areola in. And still the goals rained in from set pieces.
In the circumstances, though, the decision to start James Ward-Prowse was inexplicable. There is so much focus on West Ham’s ineptitude from corners that it is not so often asked why the ball always seems to be in their defensive third in the first place.
The midfield is virtually non-existent; that is on the board for the decisions taken in the summer, but it is also on Potter, who chose to overlook Soungoutou Magassa even after an impressive cameo against Tottenham. Freddie Potts did not make the squad.
The options for shoring up the centre-backs are thinner, but Jean-Clair Todibo surely has to start ahead of Max Kilman – utterly bullied by Jean-Philippe Mateta – at Everton. West Ham are encumbered by such a multitude of glaring issues that it is unfair to pin them on any one player, but Kilman’s struggles in the air are not new, nor does he play out successfully. Supposedly the reason for signing him in the first place.
Yet thirdly, and perhaps most criminally of all, there was a chance to rectify what was unfolding before his eyes and again, Potter did not take it. The decision to take off Mateus Fernandes over Ward-Prowse earned its own symphony: “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
West Ham fans are witnessing Amorim-lite, without the resources. You can see why Potter is resistant to adaptation, for it is what has come to be expected. Vincent Kompany prioritised conceptual football over Burnley’s relegation battle – it worked, to an extent, in that it got him the Bayern Munich job but saw the Clarets relegated. Every time Nottingham Forest concede a goal between now and the end of the season, it will be accompanied by a glib dose of confirmation bias from Ange Postecoglou’s detractors.
Against Palace there was at least a striker in the starting XI, though Callum Wilson did not complete the 90 minutes. The other opportunity was to look to the youngsters, except neither George Earthy nor Callum Marshall made the bench again.
At any rate the academy can only paper over the void of identity at this club which Potter did not create, but which he is not bridging. The trajectory from Julen Lopetegui has been all downhill and he did not leave West Ham very far up the hill to begin with.
Your next read
Selling tickets to “kids for a quid” against Brentford may be the only way of filling the ground and many will boycott that game regardless; though foregoing an afternoon at the London Stadium these days is no great sacrifice.
Supporters are left to reflect on “15 years of destroying West Ham”, unbowed by a 1,000-word statement from the board in midweek. When figureheads say “we’re listening”, it is usually code for “everything is going wrong”. Sullivan and Brady did not even do that, seeking to justify rather than apologise.
Fans are desperate for a dialogue with their owners and want a board who will vocalise their thinking, but there has to be an implicit trust that things have been thought through in the first place.
The danger is what will follow, a squad theoretically shaped by Potter soon to be under the guise of a irreparably more defensive coach. If you were looking for an answer as to what a David Sullivan manager looks like, given how many philosophies they have lurched between, you would be hard-pressed to find it. But you suspect Potter is not it.
from Football - The i Paper https://ift.tt/vZbhpUx
Post a Comment