WHAT A SHOWER!
West Ham feel chill as Moyes made to endure ‘day of embarrassment’
As WEsT HAM’s players headed to the showers at a windswept Liberty stadium on saturday evening, they were greeted by the iciest blast of their day.
The stadium endured piping issues in the early hours of the previous morning and this miserable West Ham team felt the chill. Jumping out of those cold showers may have been the quickest some of David Moyes’s players moved all day.
This was a rotten performance. Moyes called it a ‘day of embarrassment’ and the ‘worst performance’ of his tenure. As his shivering players took their seats, Moyes delivered the most stinging rebuke yet of his reign. One source said the room fell as quiet as it has been all season after Moyes’s appraisal. It is now only one victory in six games and West Ham are sinking rapidly into the relegation quicksands.
‘They know,’ Moyes said. ‘They have been told that today was miles and miles away from where I’m going — or they are going. If they play like that, then there’ll be none of us here. They definitely all need to up their levels.’
Losing by three goals to Liverpool, as West Ham did last week, is one thing. To lose by three to relegation rivals swansea is an altogether more worrying trend and it follows not long after a three-goal reverse at Brighton. And it should have been more here, with swansea taking mercy after racing into a four-goal lead inside 70 minutes.
This is a peculiar set of players; players who for too long hid behind a new stadium as a reason for poor performances. In Wales, the players offered the impression they simply did not fancy a long journey on a freezing afternoon.
‘That was a shock to me,’ Moyes said. ‘We were all well aware of the importance.’
With his hangdog demeanour, we never expect too much pizazz from a Moyes team but his side also failed to do the basics. simple, square passes went astray. Experienced pros like Pablo Zabaleta miscontrolled the ball.
Two swansea goals came from corner kicks. Mike van der Hoorn nipped ahead of young Declan Rice for the second and for the third, West Ham were beaten to the first and second ball as Andy King poked the ball in. To compound matters, defender Winston Reid was carried off on a stretcher with a serious knee injury and taken to a local hospital at half-time.
West Ham appeared disjointed all over. Goalkeeper Adrian should have saved Ki sung-yueng’s opener and Joe Hart may earn a recall. Up front, Moyes sought to shoehorn Javier Hernandez and Marko Arnautovic into a front pairing but the balance was wrong, with both players often occupying the same spaces. In the high- energy full back positions, which
Sportsmail’s Martin Keown says should be filled by ‘ high- speed trains’, West Ham went with Zabaleta and Patrice Evra, at a combined age of 69. Evra was substituted at half-time.
Matters then deteriorated off the field, as West Ham supporters confronted the club’s joint chairman David Gold in the club car park. The video circulated on social media and it was a dismal spectacle to see supporters rounding on an elderly man and telling him to ‘leave the f***ing club’. Gold protested: ‘ I’m hurting as much as you . . . I am an 82-year-old man.’
If West Ham supporters are seeking sympathy for some of their more legitimate grievances, this, surely, is the worst way to go about it. Thankfully, a couple of West
Ham fans did intervene to aid Gold. Moyes’s side now have two home games against Burnley and Southampton, which may appear promising but this is a West Ham team who have one clean sheet in their last 11 Premier League games.
This is a club teetering on the cliff edge. It may only be a sticking plaster, but the board, fans and players must unite. The alternative is one nobody would wish for.