Hypocrisy in the Premiership? Shock and horror runs through the village as Effra ponders the eternal battle over having money to spend.

Football’s version of the January sales is not the time for essential purchases. Most things on offer are over-priced young wannabes, contract rebels, or other team’s cast offs. But desperate times, and times are indeed desperate at West Ham, require decisions that might seem distinctly dubious in calmer settings.

The reassuring thing, though, is that we now have a Board that is prepared to risk having more money than sense, however much some of us still worry about where this Icelandic venture is going in the long-term. And unlike our neighbours down the posher end of town, our chairman doesn’t seem to have a problem with the manager spending money according to his own judgement.

On what we’ve seen so far Boa-Morte, Quashie (about whom I was distinctly skeptical and am happy to say that I was wrong) and Davenport all look quite astute signings, although I can’t help feeling that if one of the baby Bentley boys had given as stupid a penalty away as Boa Morte on Saturday against Newcastle, they would have been crucified. I can’t believe that inexplicable handling of the ball was in the job description that Curbishley drew up for players with bags of Premiership experience.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

Effra reckons Alan Curbishley might be cracking outside the comfort zone of Charlton.

Nothing in the West Ham story this season seems able to rest. Just when we thought that we had got straight that Curbishley was as angry as the fans with the baby Bentley boys and Reo-Coker in particular, he’s now asking us to get off the boy’s back.

To the list of the villains to blame for West Ham’s implosion, Curbishley has now added the press. Now, however different it is being manager of West Ham than Charlton, I can’t believe for a moment that Curbishley has only just discovered the concept of media spin. In a week in which England’s cricketers have also being demonstrating that there is something amiss in a national sporting culture that lauds modest success far too easily and produces too many vain young men who lack mental resilience when the going gets tough, West Ham’s woes have been the stuff of dreams for journalists casting around for a morality script.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

Effra sees a lot of changes at West Ham that aren’t actually changing anything.

It’s amazing how quickly the beginning of Curblishley’s regime has come to resemble the end of Pardew’s tenure: big wins against top clubs followed by self-imposed home defeats against mid-table opposition, question-marks about the players’ motivations, and a crowd seriously divided about the Argentineans.

Those of us who weren’t convinced that Pardew was the problem have less to wonder at than some, but I doubt even the most pessimistic of us had Pardew leading a resurgent Charlton to within two points of us by the turn of the year. For the first time this season, I really think that relegation is the most likely outcome to this farcical and shameful soap-opera.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

Effra may be glad to see West Ham win, but goalscorer and West Ham villain Nigel Reo-Coker is still a loser.

The last time West Ham beat Manchester United at Upton Park Alex Ferguson laughably described West Ham’s efforts as ‘obscene’. I can’t help wondering if something of the same thought didn’t more reasonably go through Alan Pardew’s mind yesterday afternoon, despite his bitterness-free pre-match interview showing the class of the man.

Easy to say that this win was oh so West Ham. Since this season they had already graced Upton Park with a victory against Arsenal whilst half-heartedly succumbing to Reading and Newcastle, why not follow losing three games in a row without scoring with inflicting Man United’s first away defeat of the season?

[Read the rest of this entry »]

To Effra, Alan Pardew may not even got as far as the dreaded “vote of confidence” but West Ham will always owe him thanks.

I hope that Alan Pardew knows how many West Ham fans are gutted for him. I hope enough stand up and make that clear on Sunday. I hope that Magnusson understands the magnitude of what he has done in doing this, and what the consequences may be if it turns out disastrously (and that includes appointing Sven even before a ball has been kicked under that possible regime).

On a sunny Saturday afternoon in May, the West Ham army stood together in Cardiff, a twenty-six year old dream in our grasp, and thought that Alan Pardew was our own footballing god. How in two days short of six months we got from that last exquisite moment of happiness before Scaloni sportingly put the ball out of play to Pardew’s departure, maybe we’ll never quite know. On that beautiful day (strangely more beautiful in retrospect that fortune found its hiding place after all) who, whatever their understanding of football’s enduring capacity to astonish, could possibly have conceived that by the time Christmas arrived the club’s ownership would have changed forever, and that Pardew would have lost the dressing-room and ultimately his job?

[Read the rest of this entry »]

Effra struggles to see Tevezcherano being any good for the club, regardless of how well they eventually play.

This waiting for an away goal has gone on now almost as long as the wait for any kind of goal earlier in the season did. And just like the last wait, there are those moments, like Lee Bowyer’s miss yesterday against Everton, when it seems impossible that the ball could do anything other than hit the back of the net, and those moments, like 12 corners in the first half not producing a decent half-chance, when it seems impossible to believe that a goal will ever come.

It’s tempting in the face of the West Ham soap opera this season to look for dramatic explanations of what’s going wrong but half-way through the second half yesterday it seemed pretty simple. The defenders forget to concentrate too often, the central midfielders go missing for significant parts of every game, the wide players can’t cross, and none of the fit strikers can play with Tevez. On the last problem, the answer is, of course, Dean Ashton as it has been all season. (Yet, totally gutted as I was the day he got injured, it never occurred to me that avoiding relegation was going to depend on him getting back to fitness.) The question is with whom Deano is going to play when he returns?

[Read the rest of this entry »]

Effra doesn’t think West Ham supporters should be dancing in the streets just yet. And it’s not just because the new owner is clearly some sort of alien, or Lord Of The Rings superfan.

How in the space of little more than two months West Ham have got from Tevezcherano to a takeover by an Icelandic duo who have made their money in biscuits and a Petersburg brewery I don’t know, and I wonder if even Terry Brown could make sense on the subject. Most West Ham fans, me included, have been cheered by the news that we’re now in Eggert “Eggsy” Magnusson’s hands but at ultimately this feeling is one of sheer relief, born from knowing that the Iranian and Israeli property vultures won’t now be getting their greedy hands on our club.

Pardew’s safe, the Argentineans will be gone (whatever Pardew says he wants) and we can get back to worrying about Dean Ashton getting fit and whether Nigel Reo-Coker’s strop is really over. And just in case we risked getting bored, the players this week even managed to serve us up for afters those good old-fashioned football demons of drink, gambling and violence.

But despite the relief something in our club has irrevocably changed.

[Read the rest of this entry »]