Effra looks at West Ham’s most perplexing player in a perplexing Premiership season.
Perhaps no player epitomises the still incomprehensible craziness of the West Ham soap-opera like Bobby Zamora does. He’s scored a couple of wonderful games in big games, and he’s got a few mighty flukes and the non-goal of the season to his name. Over the past ten days he’s made John Terry look poor against Chelsea and he’s been made to look poor by journeymen Sheffield United defenders. He’s shown some great touches and he’s failed to control the simplest of passes.
Under both managers he’s sometimes not even made the bench and on occasions he has kept Tevez out of the side. He’s now injured and he’s playing his best football of the season. He is mates with Reo-Coker and Anton but he doesn’t quite seem one of the Bentley boys. He has celebrated goals by pulling his West Ham badge on his shirt and shouting ‘my club, my club’, and he has celebrated them by cupping his ear at fans who have dared to criticise him. He’s driven us to complete distraction with his misses, and he’s been the author of the remnants of hope to which incredulously we are still clinging.
I don’t think I’ve ever been as perplexed about a player as I am by Bobby. I wonder how many times this season I’ve thought that he isn’t good enough for the Premiership and I wonder how many times this season I’ve reminded someone, who was making just that point to me, that his starts-to-goals ratio in the Premiership over the past two seasons really is impressive. Look at the cold facts and he is, as we sing at Upton Park, better than Jermaine and yet everybody knows that somehow that is not true.
Of all the players we could have chosen to have so much of our fate in his hands, Bobby would never have been my man. But this is West Ham in 2007 and only the script that is guaranteed to make us all demented will do.