There was some good news for West Ham United on Sunday. Segregation between home and away supporters was effective, well stewarded and looked like the kind of precaution that might normally be put in place at a Premier League match.
Not only that, but there were 950 stewards at work around the ground, 200 more than normal. Each had undergone extra training to ensure they were capable of dealing with the unique demands of a football crowd. Furthermore, some of the fans who had found themselves uncomfortable in their new seats had been reallocated positions elsewhere in the ground.
After all the controversy and coverage that followed West Ham’s previous Premier League home match against Watford, when there was trouble for varying reasons in various parts of the ground, order was restored this week. Well, off the pitch anyway. On it, all was chaos.
After a tepid opening 40 minutes in which it looked like both teams were happy to shadow box, Charlie Austin’s smart strike paved the way for a pasting. West Ham had begun the match disjointed but they finished it as a rabble. They lacked clarity, purpose and, most worryingly, commitment. Home fans will be asking why this is the case and surely wondering if the new home has something to do with it.
There are certain things that would not look right in any surroundings. With injuries depriving Slaven Bilic of both his first team left-backs, Aaron Cresswell and Arthur Masuaku, the Croatian was forced to transfer the 33-year-old Álvaro Arbeloa to an unfamiliar flank against the pace of Nathan Redmond. The marquee summer signings of Simone Zaza and Sofiane Feghouli are still feeling their way into the Premier League (for what it’s worth, Zaza was probably West Ham’s best player in the opening exchanges). There are other injuries in the squad, too; Andy Carroll and £20m André Ayew among others. However, there are other things that are definitely as inexcusable as they are apparently inexplicable. West Ham’s defending in particular was woeful. For Southampton’s first goal the midfielder‑turned‑right-back Havard Nordtveit stood bewildered as Dusan Tadic and Ryan Bertrand played their way around him. For the second, first Winston Reid and then Cheikhou Kouyaté presented the ball to the opposition and the goalkeeper Adrián gave up his goal all too easily to Tadic’s cheeky shimmy. Reid, so reliable for the Hammers for so long but looking error prone this term, did not cover himself in glory for Southampton’s third, either.
The lack of form was just as apparent, if less calamitous, at the other end of the pitch. Perhaps Dimitri Payet should have swapped his late heroics against Accrington Stanley in the EFL Cup for 45 minutes of effective input here, because the Frenchman was largely anonymous bar a purple patch halfway through the second half when his team were already 2-0 down. Manuel Lanzini, mercurial in his breakthrough season last year, was substituted at half-time here. Nortveidt went later, allowing Bilic to plonk the leading scorer Michail Antonio at right‑back, and not for the first time this season.
For all the individual failings and loss of form, it is hard not to think that there is also something wrong with the whole and, for that, Bilic must take responsibility. The defence suffered from selection difficulties but also a lack of communication and poor positioning. The midfield trio of Lanzini, Kouyaté and the captain, Mark Noble, failed to gel and were bettered by their less experienced opponents, Oriel Romeu and Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg, as well as the outstanding Steven Davis. Either sitting too deep or splitting up wide, the West Ham midfield lacked the cohesion to dominate the ball and, therefore, struggled to supply their forwards.
Fans leaving the London Stadium after this match (the few that had stayed to the end) recalled that poor performances were hardly absent last season, when West Ham eventually claimed seventh place. Indeed, in the corresponding fixture last year, West Ham had to come from one down before claiming all three points.
There was no doubt in these fans’ minds that the raucous atmosphere of the Boleyn Ground in its swansong year had helped pull the players over the line. That atmosphere has gone and, however hard the owners and fans might try, it will never come back. But a new identity needs to be forged in its place, and some might say quickly, too.
