West Ham place immense importance on games against Arsenal, as David Moyes recently revealed. Julen Lopetegui should be grateful they pulled their punches.
If Arsenal have not already accepted some responsibility for West Ham’s current plight then they simply must.
“We beat Arsenal on December 28, we beat them at the Emirates, and that day they offered me a new contract,” David Moyes said earlier this month. By February and after a performance the manager generously described as “weak” in a 6-0 thrashing against the Gunners, West Ham paused negotiations and soon withdrew that new deal.
The apparent desperation of David Sullivan and friends to make such monumental managerial decisions based heavily on the outcome of matches against Premier League title contenders Arsenal is curious, but this latest home humbling revealed nothing new.
Yet here it was, the second of Julen Lopetegui’s latest run of Two Games To Save His Job. If the first was a corner turned with victory over Newcastle, this was a crushing, deflating dead-end. West Ham were 14th, hoveringly uncomfortably above a relegation scrap with Europe not even close to the horizon; no points for guessing precisely where they stand now, no clearer than before on whether Lopetegui should even make it to January.
Had West Ham’s full-backs not inexplicably united to threaten the most ludicrous of comebacks on the stroke of half-time, this might well have been his last game. It was on course to be precisely that final and hand-forcing a result and performance. Three goals in nine minutes made it 4-0 with barely half an hour played and Arsenal at their destructive best.
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Gabriel from a Bukayo Saka corner; stunning Saka and Odegaard combination play; a penalty; even a Kai Havertz ‘getting in on the act’ goal. Arsenal played all the hits and West Ham were imploding yet again.
But a sublime Carlos Soler through ball was converted by Aaron Wan-Bissaka and a sumptuous Emerson Palmieri free-kick halved the deficit. The brilliant Saka extinguished any burgeoning hopes of some Cheick Tiote-inspired madness and restored a kinder cushion from the spot before Anthony Taylor brought a quite frankly stupid 45 minutes to a close.
It was the fourth time in Premier League history that as many as seven goals had been scored in the first half of a game. The subsequent second halves of the previous three matches told an inevitable story: across Blackburn v Leeds in September 1997, Bradford v Derby in April 2000 and Reading v Manchester United in 2012, the only goal scored in the second half was a Craig Burley penalty in the 52nd minute to salvage a draw for the relegation-battling Rams at the turn of the millennium.
A seemingly endless flow of first-half goals always precedes talk of the double-figure scoreline barrier finally being broken before the collective vinegar strokes set in soon into a sleepy second half. Arsenal preserved their energy and West Ham tried to salvage what was left of their pride. Neither side was particularly tempted to twist; Lopetegui bringing on a defensive midfielder in Edson Alvarez for the bright Crysencio Summerville before the restart was a substitution which screamed ‘stick’.
Mikel Arteta will quietly seethe at that two-minute period in which West Ham were irresistible but really this was a continuation of Arsenal finding their Odegaard return groove. This is their first set of consecutive three-goal Premier League wins since March and the second game in five days to feature five different scorers.
A period of complacency was almost mandatory but as with the Sporting victory, there was immense encouragement in how they rode that wave of momentum and quickly regained control.
West Ham could almost have done without the distraction and implication of that ‘2’ in the scoreline. It suggests something closer than this, less definitive, when in reality it was as bad as anything served up during this reign or by latter day Moyes.
It is still impossible to envisage how Lopetegui possibly makes this work, and it doesn’t really feel as though they should wait until their February visit to the Emirates to act if nothing fundamental changes.
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The Kyiv IndependentDaria Shulzhenko
