The Hammers are getting Hammered. The new Premier League season is a week old, yet here we are, gathering our thoughts after watching a couple of truly wretched West Ham performances. Well, wretched at the back anyway.
Of course, conducting grim post-mortems on how West Ham’s defence can be sliced open as readily as any team at the moment are hardly new. The club conceded 64 goals in the league last season, including defeats in which they shipped four to Liverpool, five to Arsenal and four to Manchester City. They also conceded five to City in an FA Cup game.
It seems that, too often, Slaven Bilic can be seen looking cadaverous on the touchline, bleakly watching on as his team’s defensive shape disintegrates. He has been in the job for two years but it looks, at times, as though it’s taken years off him.
This season has been the same, sorry story. After being ruthlessly dismantled by Manchester United on the opening weekend, West Ham could only follow it up with another unconvincing defensive display, conceding a further three against Southampton. Two games in, seven goals conceded, and the pressure already begins to mount on Bilic’s shoulders.
As previously mentioned, this is not a knee-jerk denunciation of their credentials. West Ham have conceded 92 goals in 50 league games. That’s almost two goals a game. Javier Hernandez may have scored twice at St Mary’s on Saturday but, with these statistics, the Mexican poacher doesn’t stand a chance.
The worrying thing for Bilic’s supporters – of which there are quite a few, because he is a charismatic coach who speaks eloquently and intelligently about the game – is that basic errors are being made in defence time and time again. He, as the head coach and organiser of the back-line, must be held accountable.
It is also worrying that the transfer window will shut in two weeks and the club is yet to sign a defender. So far, Chicarito has been signed along with Joe Hart, Pablo Zabaleta and Marko Arnautovic. It seems cruel that Zabaleta, clearly past his best, has been the Hammers’ only outfield defensive recruit and was the one to concede a stoppage-time penalty that led to Southampton’s victory.
Arnautovic, meanwhile, has also started his West Ham career unpropitiously. His elbow on Jack Stephens led to West Ham playing an hour of the defeat to the Saints with ten men. The tempestuous Austrian is yet to plumb the depths of a Zaza or a Modibo Maiga, but he certainly has some making up to do.
It’s important to point out that Winston Reid and Cheikhou Kouyate both missed the Southampton game. They are important defensively to West Ham but the failure to keep teams at bay in their absence only further highlights the lack of depth. Since the start of the 2013/14 season, Reid has missed 50 games through injury. Bilic simply cannot afford to operate on the assumption that his best defender will stay completely free of injury.
West Ham are currently intensifying efforts to sign the highly-rated holding midfielder William Carvalho from Sporting Lisbon. The Portuguese club are demanding somewhere in the region of £35million and, although that is certainly a sizeable sum to cough up, Bilic desperately needs it.
The Croatian tactician hopes to reshape his team into a regular 4-3-3 and has identified Carvalho as the ideal candidate to sit deep in midfield and shield the back-four. While the 25-year-old would be a thoroughly impressive addition, Bilic surely needs another defender if he is to haul the club out of the wreckage that has been their opening couple of fixtures.
Portions of the West Ham support used to say, rather foolishly, that they would prefer a 3-2 loss as opposed to a 1-0 win when Sam Allardyce was in charge. The popular perception of Allardyce was that he was a fantastic organiser of teams, but there was no verve, no swagger, no excitement.
Essentially, West Ham have swapped the calm for the chaos. Allardyce was never stylish but he would never drive the club towards relegation. On the evidence so far this season – and, yes, it still is early days – that’s precisely what Bilic is doing.
