West Ham team of the decade

With 2020 around the corner, I thought I’d follow the lead of others and try and come up with a team of the decade for West Ham and… I struggled, honestly. This was the best I could manage:

I refuse to pick a right-back as they’ve all been unequivocally shit. If I were forced into picking eleven players, I’d probably go for this…

But, as much as I think he’s an excellent player, I’m not sure Lanzini has actually been good enough to warrant a place.

What’s striking is how many players are essential inclusions despite effectively having one good season for the club in this time frame: Scott Parker (10/11); Dimitri Payet (15/16); Marko Arnautović (had 6 good months across the end of 17/18 and the start of 18/19); Łukasz Fabiański (18/19).

It also highlights the extent of the problem we’ve had in central midfield — Parker left the club over 8 years ago and yet he’s still head and shoulders above anyone else who has succeeded him in that area of the pitch and he’s therefore impossible not to pick.

The other problem it highlights is just how reliant the club has been on outstanding individuals to get by over the years. There’s a case to be made that this decade has been a series of one-man carry jobs for West Ham:

You can draw a fairly straight line from Parker (imagine how much worse that season under Grant would’ve been without him) > Reid (he was the difference between us going down and staying up in the first two Premier League seasons under Allardyce; our form plummeted when he was injured in 13/14) > Payet (put up one of the best individual seasons of any Premier League player full stop, let alone just for West Ham, in 15/16) > Arnautović (kept us afloat in the post-Bilić calamity)> Fabianski (the only difference between midtable mediocrity and a relegation battle under Pellegrini).

The real disaster periods at West Ham have occurred in the gaps where these individuals have left the club and the next one has yet to emerge fully. Arguably the only time we’ve been a functional collective rather than a shitshow dragged along by someone playing out of their skin by themselves was in 14/15 when Allardyce was playing a diamond with Alex Song at the base, Stewart Downing at the tip, and Diafra Sakho and Enner Valencia uptop. But he then went and spoilt that by chucking away the system in order to shoehorn Kevin Nolan and Andy Carroll back into the side.

What a depressing exercise this was.

The worst West Ham team of the decade was also a struggle, but for the polar opposite reasons: there is a bountiful excess of useless cunts to pick from. I’ve gone for this:

A few notes:

• It took everything in my power to not put Andy Carroll in here. The drain on resources he caused makes his performances fall so far short of expectation it’s barely even funny. But, unfortunately, he did score a few goals for the club and his initial loan spell was fairly decent, so there are worse offenders who deserved to be picked ahead of him.
• I tried to avoid loanees where possible unless it was necessary ( Håvard Nordtveit) or they were egregiously awful (Roger Johnson), because there’s less financial outlay on those loanees than players we’ve actually paid a transfer fee for. Gökhan Töre, Simone Zaza, Marouane Chamakh, Pablo Armero, Emmanuel Emenike and Victor Obinna can all breathe a sigh of relief.
• Given the clubs problems in central midfield, it was surprisingly difficult to find outright terrible players to fit in these roles, hence picking Nordtveit. I think this is partially because we’ve persisted with the same, tired, options in CM for the majority of this decade and those individuals have aged/declined from being substandard to a massive hindrance, without being shockingly awful in the same way someone like Roberto or Roger Johnson has been.
• Aside from the loanees, there are two basic flavours to this: 1) players who were signed on the cheap and were so bad it makes you wonder why we even bothered (Arbeloa/Evra/Diarra/Pogatetz/Roberto/Jelavić) and 2) players who were regular starters for extended periods of time and were so bad it makes you wonder how they didn’t get dropped sooner (Demel/Piquionne/Jarvis).
• Matt Jarvis might seem like a slightly harsh inclusion, given that he was evidently a more talented player than, say, someone like Gökhan Töre or Pablo Barrera. But he was a hugely expensive player at the time we signed him and he played a lot of games for the club over the course of his contract, despite being continually disappointing.
• You’re really spoilt for choice when it comes to the centre forward role. I’ve gone for Jelavić. He beats out the disaster loanees because we paid a fee for him and, despite that, he was still given the heave-ho within 6 months of joining. He edges out Modibo Maïga, who gets a pass purely for that goal against Spurs.