West Ham fans are always wanting more, but what is wrong with that?
EVEN the blurred, black-and-white footage cannot hide West Ham’s breathtaking ambition on the night they won the European CupWinners’ Cup. To watch that final back now is to be reminded of what the club’s supporters have always looked for in their heroes.
There is Martin Peters, never shirking the most technically challenging pass. Bobby Moore, demanding possession and taking up some extraordinarily high positions. Geoff Hurst, the third of the club’s holy trinity, relentlessly pounding crosses and shots at 1860 Munich in the warm evening sunlight of Wembley Stadium in 1965.
There are only two goals, though West Ham might have scored seven, and when the German goalkeeper Petar Radenkovic races out of his area to bring down Brian Dear as he canters towards goal in the second half, there is no fuss. Dear simply clambers to his feet and the two shake hands, in an act of mutual professional acknowledgement. Viewed from the perspective of our furious modernity, it is a beautiful moment.
The night’s real significance lay in its definition of the kind of club West Ham might aspire to be. They are not London’s richest and never will be. They have never been champions of this land and never will be in many fans’ lifetime.
But they blooded their own (Peters, Moore, Hurst and Dear to name a few), they played without fear, they won with panache and when they occasionally collected a trophy they basked in their own modesty. Ron Greenwood took the FA Cup home on the London Underground in 1964. The players prepared for games that season on a concrete court off a busy east London street.
Not all of the club’s heroes were home-grown. Frank McAvennie, a member of the iconic 1985-86 team who secured West Ham’s highest top-flight finish, was a former mechanic, painter and decorator, waiter and Tarmac layer who signed for £325,000 from St Mirren, to form a legendary partnership with Tony Cottee. But they had the same panache.
McAvennie arrived back in London from Melbourne on the morning of one away match at QPR, having helped Scotland to qualify for the World Cup with a play- off win over Australia. He insisted on playing at Loftus Road and promptly scored the winner. West Ham finished third that season.
In Prague tonight, another generation — Declan Rice, Jarrod Bowen, Michail Antonio and others — can write their name into West Ham history, though the inconvenient truth is that this team have been a terribly pale imitation of their predecessors.
By most available metrics — shots on target, passing sequences, goals — they were a bottom-half Premier League team in the season just concluded. Only two sides had less possession of the ball than them across the nine months.
Europe has, quite frankly, covered up a week- to- week struggle. This side have won more games in the Europa Conference League than they did in the Premier League and wound up as the lowest placed London club.
Of course, matching the Boys of ’86 is nigh on impossible now. Clubs were not powered by Gulf state sovereign wealth funds back then. But the chasm dividing rich from poor should not obscure the fact that West Ham are a club with a vast fan base, filling the 62,000-capacity London Stadium, and thus accruing huge commercial revenues.
THE most recent Deloitte Football Money League listed them as Europe’s 15th highest earning club, ahead of AC Milan, Newcastle United and Ajax and not far behind Inter Milan and Borussia Dortmund. Brighton, who finished 22 points ahead of West Ham in the Premier League, did not feature in the Deloitte top 20. Brentford, who came 19 points ahead of West Ham, were not even in the top 40.
The Money League is significant given that the cash tells you who should be winning matches. Being outperformed by Brighton, Brentford and Fulham would be a little more palatable if West Ham’s football were a lot more ambitious. Roberto De Zerbi, Thomas Frank and Marco Silva have displayed an ambition many following West Ham yearn for. Fans look down the road at those three clubs and feel, with some justification, that it is where their own team should be.
This is a complicated club, struggling in so many ways with identity. Many would say the London Stadium still does not feel like home. To have left behind the Boleyn Ground and the Champions sculpture, on the junction of Barking Road and Green Street, remains a source of sadness for some.
There have also been times in recent years when that capacity to blood young players from the area seemed to have vanished into the Stratford ether.
The disastrous decision to hire Manuel Pellegrini, who insisted on the appointment of the incapable and unqualified Mario Hussillos as director of football, saw a club famous for its production line uncouple the link between academy and first team, which Chelsea and Arsenal had.
The 5-1 hammering of Arsenal by West Ham in April’s FA Youth Cup final revealed the supply line is still there, if there is a manager brave enough to field them.
No one knows if Gideon Kodua, Divin Mubama and George Earthy will make it, but youth team manager Kevin Keen captured the West Ham ethos with his words after that victory at the Emirates. ‘This is what the club is built on. Being West Ham — we should be up there.’
The same sentiment will go for the senior side if they prevail against Fiorentina, though the future will look an uncertain place when the dust settles and Rice’s race at the club is run.
What lies beyond tonight? Another season of counterattacking football against Bournemouth and Fulham? An amorphous belief that this European adventure can somehow invigorate this club at home? If it’s time for a managerial change, who comes next? Can the board really be trusted to know?
The club has a habit of struggling to live in the moment. At around midnight after that glorious final in 1965, when the team coach had arrived back at Upton Park and the players were going their separate ways, Moore spotted Greenwood heading to his car to go home.
‘You know the trouble with this club, boss?’ he told him. ‘We don’t know how to celebrate and just enjoy the good times.’
Now fans are agonising again, asking themselves: ‘What are West Ham?’, ‘What is the limit of our ambition?’ and: ‘Are we entitled to want more?’.
The future may look a little clearer after events at Prague’s Fortuna Arena tonight.
This feels like a crossroads, as well as a final.