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My favourite thing about tonight wasn’t so much the result (although of course that is paramount) but the mentality on display. I can’t really recall a West Ham team with this much steel for years. Everywhere you look is a player with a great attitude playing at their best.
Moyes deserves so much credit for that. Derided as a dinosaur, his team is excellently organised and plays attractive, progressive football. Better still, even against stronger teams you never get the sense that we’ll capitulate or fold. That’s a huge change for West Ham sides.
This reminds me so much of 15/16, in the sense that the league is crazy. We’re better though - not so heavily reliant upon a single player, but instead with excellent players all through the team, albeit none anywhere near the level of Payet.
It feels like it would be a huge failure to not add to the squad right now, but I suppose we can’t be sure how bad the finances currently are. Still, five points off the top (!) and a paper thin squad and all we’ve done this window is sell two players. Feels pretty suboptimal.
Still, I prefer the Moyes approach of waiting for someone useful rather than just taking the next Salthouse client off the conveyor belt. Coufal took a while and I’m not sure there’s been a better value signing in the league this season.
I’m not especially convinced about Benrahma but first world problems and all that. For a player the entire system is designed to accommodate, I just don’t think he actually creates enough. Still, with 6 successive wins its churlish to moan! He absolutely may come good with Moyes
I find the initial responses to Benrahma (widely positive) and Dawson (widely negative) interesting. We’re way too caught up on reputation. West Ham teams with solid, average players! Sign me up.
My main recollection of 15/16 is missing out on the CL by being too tentative in January. (Emenike - give me strength!). I hope they don’t make the same mistake again. I sincerely hope Moyes has a plan there - we’re a couple of injuries away from disaster, as usual.
PS: Rice and Soucek are Champions League level central midfielders. I’m enjoying every minute of them while I can. We haven’t seen anything like this for quite some time and we won’t again.
PPS: In fairness to Benrahma he looks a prime candidate for “gets a goal, gets some confidence and goes from there”.
