The double act need to play it down the middle

PART of my job as a columnist and broadcaster is to follow patterns and trends on social media.

And what is noticeable right now is the growing feeling among West Ham fans that co-owners David Sullivan and David Gold have got to go.

There’s more than a trickle of unhappy Hammers changing their avatars, changing their pictures, on Twitter to that effect.

And those who are tweeting me out of the blue – or claret and blue – are all calling for the pair’s heads.

Warriors

Whenever people contact me, I try to read their profiles and their last five or six tweets to find out if they’re just keyboard warriors – or people making good points and justifying them.

I try to see if they’re also a blogger or part of a fan group, to get as much of a feel as possible for where they’re coming from.

I’m seeing that even among the most respectable Hammers fans there seems to be a bit of a feeling towards the West Ham hierarchy.

A feeling like, ‘Okay, they’ve got us into the new stadium but they maybe can’t transition us from being one of London’s mid-sized clubs to one of London’s big-sized clubs’.

And that is why the guillotine is hovering above Slaven Bilic’s neck as he prepares his team to face Huddersfield tomorrow. That’s where the pressure is really coming from.

It certainly isn’t because Sullivan and Gold are hiring and firing chairmen based on a few bad results. History has taught us they are not.

They give their managers plenty of time, no matter how much pressure they are under – and that will always be to their credit.

But when supporters’ fingers start pointing towards the boardroom rather than the dugout, that’s when the problems really start for a manager.

What’s fascinating about Sullivan and Gold, is that there doesn’t ever seem to be any middle ground. At times they are very professional. At other times West Ham is a comedy club. There’s no in-between. The owners are standing on the touchline doing the crossed- arms salute – and when they do that they just look daft. Or they’re loading the bullets for people like Sporting Lisbon sporting director Bruno de Carvalho, who are only too happy to pull the trigger. When Sullivan’s son is t weeting in depth about transfers, you wonder what’s going on. But when Sullivan and Gold are at the other end of the scale – giving their managers time to breathe – they’re almost model owners. That’s why they need to be a bit more down the middle – perhaps a bit more hardline with their managers, but with less of the silly stuff going on around the club. Like the majority of football fans, I FULFILLED a lifetime ambition on Tuesday when I met Pele – to sit down with the great man and talk about a wide variety of football topics for an hour was just fantastic. If you love football, there is one player above all others. Lots of youngsters will say, ‘It’s Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo’ – 20 years ago, they’d have said Diego Maradona. But on the football pyramid, sitting at the top, is Pele. West Ham supporters won’t care who owns their club as long as they are moving them forwards.

Let’s say someone new came along and took them to the Europa League or, with one great season, to the Champions League in the next five or six years, it’d be a case of ‘Sullivan and Gold who?’

Problems

It’s in that context that I don’t think Bilic is long for the East End world because owners are never happier than when it’s the manager getting it in the neck for the club’s problems, rather than those upstairs.

Should Bilic be sacked anytime soon it would be a shame because, with the right owners, he CAN get West Ham to where the fans – and where Sullivan and Gold, to be fair – want the club to be.

I’m kind of 50/50 at the moment. I’m prepared to give Sullivan and Gold the benefit of the doubt rather than blaming them for West Ham’s start, and I’m prepared to give Bilic the same.

But if this malaise continues into the autumn and winter then, I’m afraid for Bilic, there will only be one loser.