CAN MANUEL FIX THE FAULTY HAMMERS?
The wheels are falling off at West Ham, the only team in England’s top 11 divisions without a point, so...
The story of the orange Lamborghini sums up the malaise lying at the heart of West ham United.
It is a club with another new manager, another £100million of summer acquisitions and four straight Premier League defeats to show for it all.
The car was parked up in the same bay for days last spring at the club’s Rush Green training ground and when a regular visitor asked why, it emerged that it belonged to striker Diafra Sakho, who had left the club for Stade Rennais in France, a full three months earlier.
‘he’d just bought it and left it there,’ a source told Sportsmail. ‘The sheer waste of it — sitting there for everyone who walked past to see.’
The gargantuan incomes in Premier League football allowed a bang average forward — who has since flunked in the French league and been loaned to Bursaspor in Turkey — to view the idea of returning a £200,000 vehicle as simply not worth the effort.
Yet the same river of TV money has done pitifully little for the basic football fabric and infrastructure of the club he left behind.
When David Moyes made use of his manager’s changing room at Rush Green last season, he was surprised to find 14 other people also occupying it. he discovered that he was expected to share.
When the ‘Beast from the east’ struck last winter, Moyes had to take the players into the gym as there was inadequate undersoil heating at Rush Green. The gym was not big enough, so extra artificial turf was laid outside. West ham insist that Rush Green has had millions of pounds spent on it and is a fitting Premier League training ground. But an even more fundamental requirement for top-flight success is a serviceable system to find and buy the best players — and a picture emerges of this club’s being far below the required level.
A threadbare infrastructure would be easier to accept if West ham had one of the more basic necessities for Premier League success — a workable system to find and buy the best players.
‘They have a handful of scouts and no target lists,’ one source told Sportsmail. ‘The transfer policy seems to stem from the same four or five agents calling (co- owner) David Sullivan and telling him what he needs.
‘I’ve not come across a Premier League club like it for sheer lack of football infrastructure. Premier League income affords them this way to try to buy their way out of trouble. The rest of europe just laughs at this kind of thing.’
here is a club which does not seem capable of looking beyond which players are on the market. It is believed that earlier this year Moyes had wanted to overhaul West ham’s antiquated and random way of buying players, having built success at everton on a meticulous system.
There were promises to fans from Sullivan that things would change after the home defeat by Burnley in March provoked a pitch invasion. But West ham’s big bang instead was the arrival of Chilean manager Manuel Pellegrini, who has brought Mario husillos, sporting director of Malaga, a club relegated from La Liga last season. Very early days, but as yet no improvement.
Pellegrini has been decisive on some matters. he insisted on a three-year deal for Jack Wilshere, when Sullivan was inclined to offer the midfielder one year.
New goalkeeper Lukasz Fabianski and the new central defensive combination are solid enough. Yet the initial signs are of a club lacking any sense of the kind of football they want to play, or of how to bring the best from their players.
Marko Arnautovic is the best player on West ham’s books yet the very last thing he needs is a manager who tells him so. Moyes reined in the mighty ego and reaped the rewards, managing him more successfully than Mark hughes at Stoke or Slaven Bilic.
The more affable Pellegrini, whose man-management touch is much lighter, has made Arnautovic captain. his old Stoke traits seem to be back.
Few players, if any, will tell you Pellegrini has put a little fear in them. That was never much of a problem at Manchester City, where director of football Txiki Begiristain led the assembly of a vast squad. But there was a legacy. Pep Guardiola made Yaya Toure shed a stone after succeeding Pellegrini.
Life at West ham is vastly less comfortable and on the evidence of the first four games, the team need steel from their manager’s office. There was a fecklessness in Saturday’s last-gasp defeat by Wolves which took us back to the later Bilic era and begged the question why Sullivan considered Pellegrini to be an upgrade on Moyes in the first place.
Players out of position, not looking for each other and barely coexisting on the field. Some dreadful decision-making from Aaron Cresswell before Wolves grabbed their late winner.
Three rolls of the managerial dice on three substitutes who were not remotely interested in defending. West ham have no intention of parting company with Pellegrini, having invested in him so heavily. Only yesterday, Sullivan said: ‘The manager has our 100 per cent support. It’s a difficult moment but we must have a strong reaction.’
Pellegrini has also demanded an upgrade at Rush Green, though that will have minimal impact against the London Stadium’s next three visitors — Chelsea, Manchester United and Tottenham hotspur.
But the most urgent upgrade is needed on the pitch — and fast.