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muskie 9:06 Mon Dec 30
Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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Empty flashness of West Ham's owners has left the club stranded and spiritually homeless.
The two Davids who run West Ham thought everything would turn to Gold when they hired a former
Real Madrid manager and burned £145m on five players. With that splurge discredited,
the club lurch from grand to bland gestures.
West Ham fans will observe with mounting incredulity the collapse of the club’s plan to push
for a top-six place by hiring a manager who looked marooned in the wrong part of town -
and splashed cash on players who have so far failed to justify the cost.
Carried most weeks by Mark Noble, the local hero, West Ham’s most expensive acquisitions
answered to an abysmal communicator who looked stranded and detached in the London Stadium,
which is in danger of turning into a mausoleum for a great institution.
“Great” refers of course not to the trophy count but the sense one always had of walking into a club
that knew what it was and who it represented. West Ham fans have always been fatalistic and comedically
resigned to bubbles bursting. They could always tolerate honest fantasising turning to dust.
But the empty flashness of the present ownership offends them. Being imprisoned in a loss-making Olympic
white elephant far from the old Upton Park gnaws at their spirit.
The problem, as always in modern football, is with the people making the big decisions - their motives and agendas.
And in this age of the TV money-chasing speculator, fans who have been supporting clubs for perhaps 30 or 40 years
are asked to accept chaotic strategies and superficial corporate rhetoric. David Sullivan and David Gold,
the joint-chairmen derided by Sporting Lisbon’s president as “the dildo brothers”, must have thought they had cracked
the code when a Premier League winning manager (Manuel Pellegrini) consented to take over a mid-table team in harness
with Mario Husillos, the director of football who departed with equal haste after the home defeat by Leicester.
With Pablo Fornals (£24m), Sébastien Haller (£45m), Felipe Anderson (£36m), Issa Diop (£22m) and Andrei Yarmolenko (£18m)
in the old East End foundry, and Pellegrini’s “charm” presenting an upmarket visage, West Ham’s owners thought they could
aim for the stars in a stadium still associated in the minds of many Londoners with a scandalous bonfire of public money.
When things went wrong at the old Boleyn Ground the Hammers could stick together. The family spirit survived.
Now, the sense of exile deepens the alienation. West Ham are expensively housed and spiritually homeless.
The London Stadium lost £25.5m in the year to March and is expected to haemorrhage even more in 2020.
The ground is a financial disaster. In July for example it was revealed that £450,000 had been wasted on a search
for a sponsor for the site, which cost £323m to convert into a football stadium. The tenancy agreement still has
97 potentially dismal years to run.
These background factors are not played out on the pitch, but they add to the impression of West Ham as a club
deracinated to suit owners who lack the wisdom to run a Premier League club. Adding to that impression was the news that David Moyes has passed in their eyes from a manager who was not good enough to be given the job 19 months ago to the ideal candidate now to save them again.
“Manuel is a gentleman and it has been a real pleasure to work with someone of his calibre,” West Ham’s sacking
announcement read. Even here they are straining for a kind of decorum the board’s actions lack. The lack of trust
around the London Stadium for the regime now scrambling to stop the club going down will be a limiting factor when
the new manager takes over. Energising talented players is harder when the mood is so sour.
The popular ‘West Ham News’ Twitter feed lamented the day after Pellegrini’s dismissal:
We are entering 2020 with - A manager no one wants, having been let go of 18 months ago for not being good enough;
A stadium that is not fit for football which no one likes;
Owners that everyone detests.
Auld Lang Syne never sounded so plaintive.
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Replies - Newest Posts First ( Show In Chronological Order)
alfs barnet
5:52 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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paulon wrote...
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
Any Athletic subscribers can C&P this?
https://theathletic.com/1494456/2019/12/30/swapping-pellegrini-for-moyes-alone-wont-solve-west-hams-problems-the-structure-of-the-club-is-flawed/?amp#click=https://t.co/4l6fJNqQqj
Athletic articles can't be copied and pasted. Which is a shame because I read that earlier and thought it was a decent read.
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southbankbornnbred
1:26 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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Half-decent article which at least reflects the sentiment of many of us.
You've got to remember that Paul Haywood is not writing that for a well-informed, West Ham supporting audience. He's trying to tell the wider football supporting world who read newspapers what is happening.
Too easy to mock by saying that it is full of things we, as fans, already knew. Of course it is - we follow the minutiae of what happens at the club and its impact. Most football fans do not.
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Hammer and Pickle
12:59 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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GreenStreetPlayer 12:12 Mon Dec 30
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SurfaceAgentX2Zero
12:32 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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Paul Haywood is an absolute twat.
I won't read the article because normally it's just an excuse for a bit of virtue signalling and a lot of Man U love.
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GreenStreetPlayer
12:12 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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Forget your marches etc, in there on Wednesday there are mainly 50k+ fans, and the board, all brought together in one place.
The real chance to vent your anger on the current situation, lied to about leaving Upton Park etc.
An opportunity Wednesday to tell them to their faces for 90 mins, forget the football, this is bigger.
On Wednesday, the fans should come together as West Ham UNITED.
Let them know the fans are the club.
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cartis
11:58 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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RM10 11:41 Mon Dec 30
Why say that??
The more negative press about those two cunts the better
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,
11:52 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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Empty article, heavy on hindsight, repeating what has already been printed nationally and regionally elsewhere.
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paulon
11:51 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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Any Athletic subscribers can C&P this?
https://theathletic.com/1494456/2019/12/30/swapping-pellegrini-for-moyes-alone-wont-solve-west-hams-problems-the-structure-of-the-club-is-flawed/?amp#click=https://t.co/4l6fJNqQqj
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tonka
11:50 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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We have the power to make it more specific and detailed. Love it or hate it, we can leverage social media to our advantage, which can feed the normal media. If we can collate a thread with all the evidence of the wrongdoings of the dildo brothers, there are enough writers etc not in the boards pocket on here to do something with it.
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RM10
11:41 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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Paul Haywood- fuck off twat
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Hammer and Pickle
11:25 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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Shame the article wasn't more specific - the Daves a fly-by-night spivs who happen to have made a pile in the porn industry.
It is in their nature to take advantage of the vulnerable and offer nothing in return. Such a shame they have found such a fertile feeding ground at this once-proud club.
But now maybe this is going to be the tipping point where the fan base wakes up from its dream as disintegrated, resentful ageing blokes, wakes up and turns into a social entity capable of standing its ground and fighting again.
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kirok1
11:06 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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Decent enough article but still doesn’t, as mentioned earlier, really dive into any of the real questions about what has actually happened.
Briefly, after the Burnley incident, we saw their spending questioned. That all vanished with one ‘splash the cash’ window.
Now we are back to low spending, largely recouped by sales. Put that together with the move, you have a club that is asset stripped and then plated with a micro thin layer of shiny polish to cover the rust and decay.
Until the time limit is up and these two consider making an easy profit, it isn’t likely they’re going anywhere.
Surely a decent journalist might ask about the sale and then immediate resale of the Boleyn. How it was massively reduced in value in the accounts, just before selling at the questionably low figure and then sold for double the amount by a dubious, now defunct company set up for one deal only.
Someone might also look into the loans and payments made. Or the promises made and not delivered.
The experience of walking to the soulless bowl is barely mentioned either. Or our permanent away days over Christmas, so we don’t interfere with Shopping.
In the end, yes, our self deprecation, realism about our position and general acceptance of our likelihood of never really doing much is covered. But not the WHY of the 17th wealthiest club - apparently - never having any money to push on.
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eusebiovic
10:50 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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Nothing we don't already know but at least someone in the media is paying attention.
Football in an athletics stadium rarely turns out well especially when government is involved because the serviles fools they appoint to manage it are often clueless. To give up our freehold to the Boleyn and our relative autonomy & independence was a shocking act of self-sabotage.
But most of the post Euro 96 nouveaus lapped it all up and here we are.
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goose
10:48 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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there is still this myth that they "splashed the cash".
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Takashi Miike
10:43 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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*pissing*
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Takashi Miike
10:43 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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until haywood & cunts like him start digging in to the financial stuff, like the stadium sale & transfers, it's just missing in the wind repeating obvious stuff that's said every day on here
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Mike Oxsaw
10:37 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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OK - so we are being told - once again - what the problem is.
What needs to be asked now is "What is the solution?" - realistic solution.
It doesn't have to be palatable, or even reasonable (ground share with Tottenham for a decade or two, anyone?), but it needs - at least - to recover the deeply passionate baby (the fans) that was thrown out with the bathwater (The Boleyn Ground).
The fans alone were probably the clubs only USP, given the lack of success since we won the World Cup, and, before that, shook our fists angrily at the Hun overhead.
I accept that the old Boleyn has gone, and it's loss WILL be for what the board are forever remembered, no matter how things are spun, but the spirit of the fans needs to find a new home, and there is not a snowball's chance in hell of the former, recycled ,Olympic Stadium becoming that place.
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Bernie
10:35 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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The only thing fans can cling on to is that we get offered the chance to buy the stadium for nish and the sexual deviants then sell through club once the 10yr government penalty has past.
That's all weve got
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Northern Sold
10:35 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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Spiritually homeless...
Says it all for me...
Anyway Moyes is here... lets back him and the board and get behind the team blahs blah...
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jfk
10:05 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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Blokes a creepy fucker but knows how to bake a cake.
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Chigwell
9:56 Mon Dec 30
Re: Paul Haywood nails it - good article
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Not very insightful though is it?
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