West Ham Season Preview 18/19 Part 2
Departures
Reece Burke, £1.5m to Hull City
This initially feels like it’s too cheap but in the cold light of day, it’s probably right.
The only time Burke has managed to string together a consistent run of good form was playing for Bradford in League One. We’ve probably hindered his development a bit with a some shit loan situations since then, but he’s not been able to establish himself as a regular first team player at either Bolton or Wigan.
Burke will be 22 in September and the likelihood of him suddenly becoming a Premier League level player after a couple of mediocre seasons at the bottom end of the Championship seems quite slim. It’s probably best for everyone to move on.
If we look at Burke at what he is (a squad player for a bottom half Championship club) rather than what he could be, the transfer fee seems more reasonable. Harlee Dean and Marc Roberts were both established midtable Championship CBs and went for less than £4mil each and with that in mind, £1.5m for Burke isn’t terrible.
James Collins, released on a free
A sad decision to make as he’s been a dedicated player across his two spells at the club and is by all accounts an outstanding professional and a generally a good bloke. The fact remains though that he’s essentially done as a player at the top level. He had some decent performances last season when playing as part of an exceptionally deep back five, where all he had to do was head the ball away against opponents who had no game plan to break us down beyond tossing crosses into the box.
When Collins was asked to do any more than that, he started creaking and he was a bit of a liability in possession. There was no chance of him adapting well to what Pellegrini will require from his CBs so the writing was always on the wall for Ginge.
If, as reported, the club did actually inform him of their decision to not renew his contract by email, then it’s a disgrace and he certainly deserved to be treated better than that. From a footballing perspective though, he had to go.
Patrice Evra, released on a free
We lost both games he started in 4–1. What a fucking waste of time for everyone involved.
Marcus Browne, loan to Oxford United
I know it didn’t really work out when we sent Toni Martinez there, but this is a loan that actually makes sense on paper.
Oxford have done well recently by picking up players who were previously in Premier League academies (Kemar Roofe, John Lundstram, Ryan Ledson) and helping them to kick on and Karl Robinson has a good track record of developing young players.
Browne has clearly outgrown under-23 football and evidently needs some first team minutes. His previous loan spell at Wigan was a disaster, but they were a bit of a shambles at the time, so perhaps that wasn’t entirely down to him. It’s good to see us actually send our young players out into the right sort of environment for a change. Hopefully we’ve learnt some lessons from previous mistakes.
Cheikhou Kouyaté, ~£9.5m to Crystal Palace
It’s a shame how much he declined for us over the last 18 months. Kouyaté was never especially good from a technical standpoint but he was really effective at breaking up play and surging forward with the ball in his first couple of seasons. Then his performances just fell off a cliff.
I have a feeling he’ll do well at Palace. Playing alongside someone like Milivojevic will suit him as it’ll free him up to join in higher up the pitch and Hodgson generally seems quite good at figuring out how to utilise limited players.
Even so, this is a good move from our perspective as he no longer fits our style of play. The fee appears a little on the cheap side, but that seems like the club making a compromise on the initial payment in order to facilitate his exit; Kouyaté signed a new 5-year contract with West Ham at the end of the 2015/16 season so was likely to be on considerable wages and in order to meet his personal terms, Palace presumably had to limit their expenditure on the transfer fee. It’s worth taking a bit of a hit on that in order to get him off the books and free up some cash for wages.
Jordan Hugill, loan to Middlesbrough
He played just 22 minutes for us after we forked out £8m for him in January. What on earth were we thinking?
Losing Hugill will have little impact on the first team, but his departure does leave us with Hernández, Arnautović, Carroll, Pérez, Antonio, and Martínez, as our striking options. That seems a little thin, especially if we’re contemplating playing two upfront for any prolonged period of time but we’ve essentially done one in, one out on player who can play upfront so we’re not really any worse than where we started.
Domingos Quina, £1m to Watford
Difficult to know what to make of this one. He’s long been heralded as a promising young player and he recently played a fairly significant role for Portugal in the under-19 European Championship. Quina’s played very little senior football though and it’s impossible at this stage to get a good read on just how good he’s going to be.
What is clear is that he wasn’t going to playing much first team football at West Ham in the foreseeable future so, from his perspective, if he wants to maximise his talents by getting game time, a move makes a lot of sense.
From the club’s perspective, he’s a player in the last year of his contract who was allegedly on sizeable wages for someone of his age and experience level, so perhaps taking a fee now is preferable to losing him for nothing next summer. Apparently we’ve hedged our bets by including a sell-on clause, so if he does come good at Watford, at least we’ll pick up a slice of his next transfer fee.
As it stands, we’ve maxed out our 25-man Premier League squad, so we can’t sign anyone else in future windows unless a) someone leaves, b) they’re under 21, or c) we don’t register one of our current players. Cullen, Byram, Obiang, and Fernandes are included in that 25 atm, so if one of them leaves (which seems likely) then things change.
If just one of Byram or Cullen go, then an incoming player would have to be home-grown or under-21. If only one of Fernandes or Obiang goes, then we can bring in whoever.
Issa Diop will have to be registered next season, so we’ll likely have to have a bit of a clear out and reshuffle at that point. If Carroll and Hugill are binned off next summer, we’ll probably have to bring in at least one association-trained player.
Overview
I have some sympathy with Manuel Pellegrini — the squad was in a terrible state when he arrived and he had little option other than to rip it up and start again.
But we have seen far too many times how difficult it is to try and rebuild an entire squad in one window: Milan last season; Everton post-Lukaku; Liverpool post-Suárez; Tottenham post-Bale — all these clubs struggled to create something cohesive out of an influx of first team players in a short space of time and, as a result, each of them had a spell where their results were disappointing. The situation for West Ham is slightly different as they aren’t rebuilding in the wake of a major player leaving, but the overall point still stands.
Trying to integrate a minimum of 6 new players into our starting XI is difficult enough but our existing players are also going to have to adapt to a new style of football that a) is the polar opposite to what they were doing last season and b) that none of them really have any previous experience of playing (except Hernández). Combine that with the adjustment period of a new manager and a relatively short pre-season and I think it will end up being a bit rough for a while. Our opening schedule is difficult and I don’t know if Pellegrini is tactically flexible enough to grind out those games. Things will be disjointed until at least Christmas and we’ll need to be patient to see Pellegrini properly implement his football.
The other concern is that, for all the money that we’ve spent, I’m not entirely convinced that we’ve addressed our major issues from the last two seasons. We had the worst defensive record in the league last season and that stemmed largely from both the lack of structure and the lack of a mobile, disciplined destructive player in midfield which left our backline exposed on a regular basis. Rather than rectifying that in the transfer market, the club have instead signed three quarters of a new back four and a new goalkeeper, which seems like a case of treating the symptoms of a problem rather than the cause. The last minute addition of Carlos Sánchez might change that slightly, but his doesn’t exactly represent a desire to address a major problem.
The spine of the team is still devoid of pace and it’s difficult to see how we’re going to effectively transition the ball from our defensive third into the opposition half: Fabianski’s kicking isn’t great and all of the central defenders are limited in possession and incapable of breaking the lines themselves. We’re essentially in a situation again where Mark Noble has to start as he’s the only one of our current central midfield options who can drop off, pick the ball up off the back four and (somewhat) reliably progress it up the pitch. For all of his merits, if West Ham truly want to kick on to the next level, we can’t be in a position where Nobes is an undisputed starter.
It’s also unclear exactly how all of these pieces will fit together — how can you get Wilshere, Yarmolenko, Anderson, Arnautović and Hernández into a team without leaving it horribly unbalanced? That’s without factoring in Manuel Lanzini who is set to return at some point after Christmas. When he’s back, the picture gets even more muddled and it’s difficult to see any of the names listed above being happy with spending a significant amount of time on the bench. Pellegrini has got his work cut out to find the right balance and to keep his various attacking options content at the club.
With all that in mind, I think we’ll finish in the bottom half this season. There are a number of clubs who were further ahead of us last season and they’ve all recruited for their needs as well as, if not better, than we have so it’s hard to see how we’ll make up the ground this year. At the minute, Leicester, Brighton, Palace, Wolves, and arguably Fulham are all clubs with established managers and styles of play and as a result their squads are currently more fit for purpose than ours, so we’re stuck in a tier slightly below them along with Everton and Southampton, who are also having rebuild seasons.
Frankly, I’m not too bothered by that — the difference between finishing 9th and 13th is neither here nor there to me — but what I do want is for our football to not be a joyless, soul-destroying experience to watch. If we finish in the bottom half, but we try to play entertaining football and we actively try to win games against teams of similar stature, rather than turning up and being happy to grind out a point every week, I’ll be happy.
For the most part, I’m positive about the work we’ve done with the squad but there are some major problems that still need to be addressed. This season is bound to be uneven and messy, but hopefully we keep faith with what we’re trying to do and lay the foundations for future success under Pellegrini.
