Superclasico hero Lanzini ready for the big challenges

Old Trafford will not daunt West Ham star who scored in fevered Buenos Aires

P derby, writes Jason Burt ressure. Manuel Lanzini knows that West Ham United’s plight near the bottom of the Premier League table is worrying – there have been team meetings, there have been recriminations and there has been finger-pointing – but it is not something the 23-year-old cannot cope with.

It is Manchester United away today, and Old Trafford is a daunting enough venue, especially for a team scrabbling around for points. West Ham return there on Wednesday for the quarter-final of the EFL Cup and after that, in the league, it is Arsenal at home and Liverpool away.

But Lanzini is not fazed. After all, this is the young man who scored the fastest goal in the history of the Superclasico, the bitterest, fiercest rivalry in South American football between the giant Argentine clubs of Boca Juniors and his beloved River Plate.

“Unbelievable,” Lanzini recalls. “Forty-three seconds. It was crazy what I felt when the ball went in. Two weeks before the game, I couldn’t go out on the streets. If you lose, you never go out again until the next one. But if you win, it’s amazing. Amazing.

“You have to look at my face to see what my reaction was. I didn’t know what to do. They are the games the fans never forget. Whenever a River Plate fan crosses me in the street, they say, ‘Thanks for the goal against Boca’. I won a title with River, but all they say is thanks for the goal against Boca.”

River eventually drew 1-1 in that match, in 2013, marred by crowd violence, small bombs – petards – set off, riot police, two red cards and the referee close to abandoning the game. Just your average Superclasico, in fact.

Lanzini scored again at La Bombonera, in a game when the opposition fans were banned, and this time River, the club he joined aged nine, where he was compared because of his slight build and trickery to his idol Pablo Aimar, were victorious.

“You should come to the River Plate stadium,” Lanzini, who was born near Buenos Aires, says as he speaks through a translator.

“It’s much better. The fans are crazy. It’s poetic. I can play anywhere after that. It’s a great pitch and the fans make it. I was 17 when I first played there. The whole world of River, it meant a lot. Everyone in Argentina is crazy about their club.”

West Ham are in their own new home, of course. And there have been problems on and off the pitch at the Olympic Stadium – now called the London Stadium – although Lanzini refuses to blame the move for a season that, so far, has the team hovering just above the relegation zone.

“I don’t think the stadium or the pitch is an excuse for having started the season badly,” he maintains. “But there are some factors playing on a smaller pitch. Now we have to get used to playing on a bigger pitch.”

So why has the campaign opened so disappointingly? Lanzini thinks hard. He has just, enthusiastically, joined in with the pupils in games of handball, hockey and, of course, football at the George Carey Church of England Primary School in Barking, east London. He is there through the work of the West Ham United Foundation