Carroll rises to the challenge
Bicycle-kick goal wows crowd and crushes Palace in Payet’s absence
WELL DONE, Dimitri Payet. With his selfish refusal to play for a club who pay him £120,000 a week, he may just have brought West Ham’s season to life, reminding everyone at the club how to unite and fight.
As for the flair which is sure to be missed if Payet continues his oneman strike, step forward Andy Carroll, who produced a magnificent bicycle kick for the second goal.
Want more flair? Well, there was Manuel Lanzini, sprinting away to make it three with a delectable chip over Wayne Hennessey as the Crystal Palace keeper came off his line.
Still more? How about Michail Antonio, who had spent the previous day in bed with flu but demanded to play and created all three goals, starting with one on a plate for Sofiane Feghouli, who was summoned to take Payet’s role in the team.
As Sam Allardyce suffered on his first return to West Ham as Palace boss, the home crowd roared the name of Slaven Bilic, his successor, who outed Payet’s refusal to play and desire to return to Marseille.
Co-owners David Sullivan and David Gold also made their feelings clear and the whole messy episode made the seemingly impossible possible by injecting some passion and atmosphere into London Stadium.
Some Hammers fans even dabbled with a new, far less flattering version of their ode to Payet. ‘F*** off Payet,’ it went, ‘we just don’t want you any more.’
The mood was clear before kickoff when the security team felt the need to deploy a steward as protection for the life-size image of Payet on the stadium’s outer wall.
West Ham joined forces and forgot, at least for the time being, about the internal strife which has sapped the fun from the post-Upton Park era.
They also needed a tactical tweak from Bilic to get them going, because very little of note happened in the first half, other than a volley from Carroll which fizzed just over and a sitter missed from close range by Palace defender James Tomkins, back at his former club.
West Ham switched from a back three to 4-4-2 at half-time and Antonio was released from his wing-back duties and pushed forward alongside Carroll, with Lanzini on the left.
Everyone appeared more comfortable and Carroll was suddenly an enormous threat from almost every situation. First, with back to goal, he spun and fired wide from the edge of the penalty area and was denied at the back post by strong defending from Tomkins, deployed by Allardyce as a right-back.
Next he twisted clear of Tomkins in a crowd scene only to blaze over, and, after an exciting dribble by Feghouli, had the confidence to take on a highly ambitious volley from 35 yards which crashed into a wall of bodies.
Lanzini curled a free-kick over and Sam Byram, impressive after coming on at half-time to play rightback, went close but West Ham kept hammering away until Palace’s resistance was broken by a simple pass from Noble to Antonio, who side-stepped Hennessey.
The goal was open for Antonio but he dragged the ball square, deliberately or fortuitously, to the feet of Feghouli, who tapped in his first Premier League goal seven months after signing from Valencia.
Allardyce responded with a double substitution, sending Loic Remy up front alongside Christian Benteke, but after a brief spell of pressure his team crumbled. ‘We have to be more resilient,’ moaned the Palace boss. ‘Make sure we shut them out. I didn’t feel like we’d collapse but we did. The capability to not lose is the key to getting out of trouble and we don’t have that.
‘Once we gifted them the first goal we lost our shape and discipline, we started making mistakes and West Ham ended up scoring three. I was pretty shocked at the end.’
Carroll’s scissor-kick lifted the home crowd, an ‘I-was-there’ moment which sent them home in excitement at the prospect of watching it again on Match of the Day.
Lanzini advanced down the left, turned the ball back to Antonio and he clipped it deep into the penalty area. Carroll checked his run, adjusted, launched into the air and his scissor-kick flashed into the net. It was, he admitted after the match, the ‘best goal’ of his career.
‘When he does it in training I’m afraid he’s going to get injured,’ said Bilic. ‘It’s a great goal, not the fifth goal of the game, it was a crucial one.
‘It is already a contender for the Goal of the Season, at home in front of our fans in a very important game. It’s more than a goal.’
Lanzini sped clear on to another Antonio pass and clipped in the third with four minutes remaining and a beaming Bilic hugged his players after the final whistle.
It was the perfect response to the five-goal drubbing at home against Manchester City in the FA Cup. Three points, nine clear of Palace, happy Hammers. Dimitri who?