Everton 1-1 West Ham (Keane 18′ | Bowen 65′)
HILL DICKINSON STADIUM — It’s a sign of how hard it is to truly fail as an established club in the Premier League that West Ham United, whose last two managers have performed pathetically and who are run as a fiefdom by a 76-year-old bloke no supporter believes is right for such responsibility, have responded to their latest calamity by appointing the most overachieving Premier League manager of last season.
Nottingham Forest’s weirdness is West Ham’s gain. Nuno Espirito Santo has been out of work for days, not months, but sees no need for a break because the rapidity of the messy City Ground descent was so pronounced. Proving his former owner wrong for appointing and backing a new sporting director over him can be a powerful fuel.
A lurch back to the past?
There has been some media chatter over the last few days that West Ham appointing Nuno is proof that they should never have allowed David Moyes to leave, a 16-month gotcha. Which… maybe. But then Moyes was out of contract and had won five of his previous 25 matches. Moyes leaving was partly about chasing a different dream, but also because he had only beaten Luton, Wolves, Freiburg, Everton and Brentford over a period of five months.
Nor is it fair to label Nuno exclusively as some gnarled, dour defensive master; Forest did score 58 league goals last season including a seven, a four and five threes. Too often, pragmatism is used as a synonym for defensiveness. Instead it is the antonym of dogmatism, a refusal to stick steadfastly to one principle in favour of using one that best suits the ingredients. Sounds an awful lot like logic, doesn’t it?
Still, this is West Ham re-entering an age of pragmatism and an abandonment of a new age of possession-based play, after Julen Lopetegui failed and Graham Potter failed harder. Potter is a manager who you appoint when you have built the system to fit him. West Ham haven’t even bothered drawing blueprints for at least 20 years.
After two training sessions, and without his usual coaching staff alongside him yet, there were signs of what West Ham will try to be under Nuno. Jarrod Bowen and Crysencio Summerville will be the potent counter-attacking wingers, although Summerville is wasteful. Lucas Paqueta will play Morgan Gibbs-White, the central midfielder with licence to roam. Kyle Walker-Peters and El Hadji Malick Diouf will overlap from full-back when possible, but be expected to sprint from and towards their own goal.
"The first goal under Nuno!"
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) September 29, 2025
Jarrod Bowen equalises for West Hampic.twitter.com/my7HgYzLZc
They were different and they were improved. The attack that produced the second-half equaliser was exactly what Nuno will demand: a full-back overlapping a counter-attacking winger and an overload at the back post where the best attacking player finds space and scores. They largely controlled the match from that moment onwards, bar a late Everton flurry.
The hurdles Nuno faces
There are two obvious eventual flaws to this plan. The first is that to counter attack successfully you must soak up pressure effectively, and recently West Ham have had the defensive resilience of damp tissue paper. Beto and Michael Keane are two of the less subtle penalty-box presences; both were given four yards of space by miserable markers. Let me just say now: Konstantinos Mavropanos is not Nikola Milenkovic. That will have to change.
A closer look at that header from Michael Keane
— Sky Sports Premier League (@SkySportsPL) September 29, 2025pic.twitter.com/ejRKj9oC15
More broadly, Nuno must also cope with a club in the centre of an angry existential storm. During the first half on Monday, away supporters called both Karren Brady and David Sullivan the worst of all the words and demanded that the entire board be sacked. This fanbase is in favour of this appointment, and they are lucky to have Nuno. But they know that no man can hold back the tidal wave of incompetence forever.
Nuno will guarantee a tactical identity, which is more than can be said for Potter’s beigeball, a fragmented assortment of half ideas that no player ever seemed convinced by. West Ham will mean something on the pitch and it would be surprising if he did not eventually take this team away from its latest short-term emergency.
Repeated short-term emergencies are usually the most salient symptom of long-term malaise; that is a crisis West Ham supporters will fight against and Nuno must distract his players from. There were easier jobs to take and most would have come after a period of rest and recuperation.
It is that chaos that has brought West Ham roughly back to where they were, in 2018 and again in 2024 when Moyes left. They need someone to deliver in the now not build for tomorrow, because their house has no stable foundations anyway. For that remit, they could have appointed nobody better and available.
Your next read
from Football - The i Paper https://ift.tt/7j0L49A
Post a Comment