Effra joins the rest of the West Ham support in awaiting the outcome of a slightly significant board meeting.
When your team has lost five in a row without scoring a goal, football does strange things to your mind without the added complications swirling around West Ham at the moment.
The laws of gravity apparently prohibiting the ball reaching the back of the net, a perpetual disregard for the facts in parts of the media, other teams’ fans believing that a continuation of our misery would be in the national interest, and spending as much time worrying about foreign takeovers as how our strikers are going to recover their confidence is not good for anyone’s sanity. But neither I think are things quite what they sometimes seem.
Israeli businessman Eli Papouchado’s comments last week that he was looking at a ‘real-estate’ deal in east London says all that needs to said about the property vultures who would destroy West Ham for a quick buck out of the 2012 Olympics. But in saying it in public he has also made it that much more difficult for Terence Brown to sell the club. If, as seems increasingly likely, Joorabchian can’t raise the money there may be a way out of this even if it involves ditching Tevez and Mascherano in January.
It has also become clear in the last week that Pardew’s position is rather stronger than most of us feared. Who knows what he actually thought about Tevezcherano a month ago and maybe he was more optimistic than he seems to be now as the Daily Mail claims he is about to tell the West Ham board that the Argies have been ‘a disaster‘. But if they leave the club now or in January, nobody’s going to think that they failed here because Pardew wasn’t up to it. And if they were to stay for a while everyone could see against Reading that Tevez playing with Ashton would be a great partnership. Best of all was the support West Ham fans gave Pardew on Sunday and his appreciation of that. If he really did give the board an ultimatum about the takeover after the game, then Brown and co could have had no illusions about the consequences of accepting his resignation. Astonishing as this would have seemed eighteen months ago, Pardew and the club’s fate are bound together now.
The message to the Board is clear: sell out to the moneymen and lose Pardew because he walks or gets sacked for a name, and we’ll put up the fight of our lives.