After his performances in the last few games, and his topping the Premier League assist table, I owe Carlton Cole a serious apology given my bad-mouthing him after the Sunderland game. A run in the side and a few goals has transformed his confidence and with it his ability, just what I was hastily proclaiming was never going to happen. Gone is the clumsy, loping striker with a lousy touch, and in his place we have a powerful, hard-working centre-forward making life extremely difficult for defenders.

Sure, nice as 5-0 wins away from home are, and they come along about once every couple of decades for West Ham fans, no-one should get too carried away when a centre-forward performance as good as Cole’s on Saturday comes against a team as miserable as Derby. Yet two months ago Cole wouldn’t have been holding the ball up, knocking headers down, passing balls in like that if the opposition had been sub-Championship standard. Just sometimes perhaps we should take players at their word. Some of them are willing to put the effort in to get better and they do deserve more than a couple of chances to prove their worth before we all convince ourselves that they are not fit to wear the shirts of our beloved clubs.

When Ashton pronounces himself fit again for the Tottenham game, Cole is probably going to keep him out of the side. Now if someone had said that to me, at any point during last season or the beginning of this, I would probably have thought that they were well on the way to being sectioned. Carlton, I’m sorry.

Writing about Dean Ashton makes me nervous. The last time I devoted a column to him, telling everybody that he and Rooney would be England’s strike-force by the summer of 2007, he broke his ankle ten days later and in retrospect the misery that was West Ham last season had officially begun. It’s hard to over-estimate just how much might have been different for West Ham if Deano had not collided with Shaun Wright-Phillips on that fateful August morning. Would Pardew have been able to have resist Terry Brown’s Greek gift of Tevez and Mascherano if his prize striker wasn’t injured? If he hadn’t, would Pardew still be in his job if Tevez had been able to play from the start with Ashton rather than one or the other of a set strikers that had forgotten where the net was and Sheringham excepted, were too-confidence dependent not to be threatened by Tevez’ arrival? And if so, could the 2006 Cup Final performance perhaps have been the beginning of the road to the top 6 instead of the measure of the height from which we fell into the most desperate relegation battle imaginable,? Alan Pardew will probably be haunted by that question for the rest of his life.

Now Deano is back and lots of people, including Ashton himself, want to go back to where it all started and make him England’s centre forward. Yet having been an enthusiastic backer of Ashton last time, I really hope that for the moment anyway McClaren doesn’t come calling. Partly of course, the thought of Deano getting injured again really is just too much to bear. But the bottom line is that, as anyone who has actually watched West Ham play this season rather than read about it in the media knows, he is some distance from full match fitness. He looks slow, and doesn’t seem able to jump. He is getting by on hard work and his technique. I still think, no doubt as rashly as last time, that, assuming the whole qualification doesn’t go pear-shape, that come next summer Ashton and Rooney should be England’s future but please for now can we keep Deano’s ongoing recovery to ourselves.

So Roman has sent Jose packing and put an inexperienced crony in charge of a team supposed to win the Champions League twice within six years. Meanwhile Russian vultures are circling around some more London prey, West Ham’s Icelandic owner has flexed his muscles in the power structure at Upton Park, and Daniel Levy has humiliated Martin Jol once again for a fantasy that could never have happened. Not quite just another week in the Premiership for London clubs, but somehow it seems par for the course for what the Premiership is becoming. The new-breed of owner sees opportunities for moving and making money in what is a spectacularly unregulated big-business sector, and assumes that the only business strategy that will work to keep the cash flowing is instant and repeated success. If the manager the owners appoints doesn’t produce the goods then it must be because he is doing something that could be put right by listening to those more ignorant about the game than him.

Of course, one can reasonably question whether Mourinho cared enough about footballing glory rather than mere success, or ask why Martin Jol seems so determined to self-destruct over Jermain Defoe, or wonder if Alan Curbishley really has what it takes to be a top-class manager. But Roman Abramovich, Daniel Levy, Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson and their ilk are all far too complicit in their managers’ problems then to stand judge and jury about their supposed failures. If Abramovich and Levy had let their managers buy the players they wanted to over the past year, those managers would almost certainly have presided over better starts to the season. If West Ham’s Icelandic owners weren’t purring away about the supposed prospect of Champions League football in east London within four years, Curbishley might find it easier to keep West Ham’s players, many of whose heads have already been disastrously turned by inflated expectations of their ability, focused on steady improvement so that every step forward isn’t immediately followed by at least one backwards because the players get casual.

What is just dispiriting is that the impatience of the owners seems to be contagious where some fans are concerned. Too many fans seem to think that because these owners have come in and spent more money than their clubs have done in the past that supporting their club is going to be permanently different. How many fans now of clubs outside the big four are convinced that their club has to finish in the top six to show that they have ambition and are on target for ‘the next level’. Assuming that Chelsea don’t now implode only two of them can, but half the rest of the Premiership are supposed to be regarded as failures if they don’t make it into Europe. Lose any game, and increasingly the attitude seems to be that it must be someone in the team’s fault. Sure, sometimes it is, but sometimes losing is just what happens to one team in a contested football match where lots of possibilities collide. Just because we pay a lot of money to go to watch football matches doesn’t give us some sacred right to moan that this that or the other that happens at them is unacceptable.

We all might have more reason to resent the money we spend than we used to given how much the players get paid, but if we end up thinking that forking out on expensive season tickets, away matches, and merchandise still buys anything other than a train seat on an emotional roller-coaster, destined for most fans each year to the land of disappointment, then we’ve become just as blind to the realities of football as the billionaires who are using English football as their financial and personal playthings.

One dire, one promising, and one frustrating performance has already, it seems, divided West Ham fans about what this season is supposed to be about.

Some seem to think that we should be travelling at mega-speed to Magnusson’s promised land. Even if they are not quite as deranged in bankrupt optimism as those Spurs fans who think that Levy’s inability to trust any manager to choose as well as motivate a team will soon produce glory, these West Ham fans need a serious reality check. Unless and until Dean Ashton returns to anything like full match fitness and his pre-injury form, we have no obvious advantage over any of the clubs who could finish anywhere between 6th and the bottom six.

We can hope that the experienced Premier League performers we have signed this summer will make us less prone to the confidence crises that blighted last season, but these players come with the baggage of being injury-prone. This strategy could go horribly wrong and the season could disappear under a nightmare of crocked hamstrings and groins, but before those who are already mad at Curbishley shout that it is therefore too risky, they should ask themselves exactly what strategy an aspiring club like West Ham should pursue that would have a better chance of success.

Swen’s international shopping looks a lot flashier but it is yet to be tested against the endurance demands of the Premier League’s winter months,and City’s impressive start has been driven by the two products of the club’s youth academy, Micah Richards and Casper Schmeicel. It’s not exciting, and it won’t (thank heavens) be like the roller-coaster of last season, but mid-table mediocrity and a battle-hardened Curbishley ready to move up a level next year is what this season is realistically all about.

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Three well-earned points has averted what would have been a media-generated, full-scale crisis for West Ham. The smell of last season just won’t go away. The deluded Kevin McCabe seems determined to repeat his untruths until he has handed over all his club’s assets to wide-eyed lawyers whilst those journalists not busy taking notes on a few more conversations with Kia have been busy with the supposed latest bust-up in the West Ham dressing room about Curbishley’s management. I’d like to think that this was just pure media invention, but since Robert Green has recently admitted that there appeared to be a mole in the West Ham dressing room last year, and Curbishley still has a few unhappy Bentley boys on his hand, as well as the wrath of those whom he did manage to sell, then perhaps there is still someone wreaking mischief from within. If so we have got less than two weeks to be rid of them.

But even if we could be sure that our players are all committed to the cause, the media are hungry for trouble and apparently determined to cause Curbishley problems. Even with three points from two games, we’re still reading that Curbishley doesn’t know what he is doing in the transfer market, or that he has six weeks to save his job. Sure on his own admission he has made some mistakes, and given the gulf in expectations and media attention between being manager of Charlton and West Ham, Curbishley does have something to prove and his public utterances shows he knows it.

But even if you can’t see through Sheffield’s pathetic self-pity, the Tevez affair can hardly be blamed on Curbishley. It’s also not his fault if West Ham have got a bit more money to spend than usual, or that he inherited a group of misbehaving prima donnas from Pardew or that Pardew, who is still something of a media darling nonetheless, let a bit of success go to his head. Whatever sins of modern football the media think West Ham have come to symbolise, having Alan Curbishley as our manager can’t possibly be one of them. So the journalists think he’s not very charismatic but neither is Fergie if you take away his success. Curbishley is a rare thing: an experienced, English manager with no suggestion of crookedness managing the club that he grew up with, using far fewer foreign players than many of his rivals, and trying to take the chance that the new owners have given West Ham to be something more than a yo-yo club.

Those who proclaim to be unhappy about this that or the other about the state of the Premier League should really look elsewhere to satisfy their hypocritical sanctimony.

When you feel like you’ve been living through another football season over the summer, the start of the actual season doesn’t feel quite the same. After a summer of listening to whining and lies, waiting for the decisions of arbitration hearings and the High Court, frequent disbelief at an anti-West Ham media frenzy, fantasising about citizen arrests for Interpol, and last-minute transfer collapses, we West Ham fans have dispended at least half of this season’s nervous energy already and that says nothing for the lingering damage to organs we didn’t know existed from the rollercoaster of our truly miraculous escape last year.

Now, post-Tevez, here we are, about to go again. That virtually nobody now likes us is beginning to grow on me. Where every other media commentator going has us cast as the Premiership’s bags-of-money impostors, the siege mentality that the Tevez saga has created at Upton Park might just be worth something. Just to remind the rest of you though: we didn’t play an illegally registered player, we didn’t break the Premiership rules on third-party ownership, we didn’t’ break a rule that other clubs committing the same offence had been punished for by point-deductions, and Carlos Tevez didn’t play in all eleven positions on the pitch in the last nine games of the season. Kia Joorabchian, meanwhile, didn’t have ‘explosive documents’, he has not let Manchester United buy Tevez, and he is wanted by the Brazilian police. (Daily Mail journalists in particular please take note.)

And as for our summer sins, we have not been the Premiership’s big spenders. Elementary arithmetic says that £24M in expenditure and £22M in sales is in net terms £2M, far less than almost any other team in the Premiership. That we haven’t spent enough and that there are some obvious problems (full-back, central-midfield, and striker cover) is what quite rightly bothers most West Ham fans. Sure we tried to spend a lot of money on Darren Bent, but I suspect that Tottenham, not anyone else, will have the last laugh there. If West Ham have distorted the transfer market this summer, it was getting Aston Villa to pay £8.5M for Reo-Coker, a player who everyone knew couldn’t possibly stay at Upton Park.

After everything that has happened, heady optimism might be taken as a sufficient condition of mental insanity, and when Julien Faubert was knocked out for six months the feeling that we really have become cursed was inescapable. But there are some grounds for hope. We do have the spine of a good team, just one that at the moment that will get exposed by injuries in certain positions. Eggy appears to be a class act. We’ve always needed someone to symbolise our passion, and now strangely it’s the chairman.

As for Curbishley, the jury is still out. In keeping us up as Charlton went down, he has vanquished Pardew’s ghost. But now he’s rid of Reo-Coker, Tevez, and Sheringham – the three players who, in very different ways, were in retrospect most responsible for derailing last season. So for the first time the buck properly stops with him. His willingness to sign bad boys actually encourages me, not because I am at all sure about the wisdom of having Bellamy or Dyer at the club but because it shows that he’s not as risk-averse as his Charlton days might suggest. Much as we would all love it, there aren’t another 5 Mark Nobles in the youth team just waiting for the chance to bring European football back to Upton Park. Football is as it is now, and Curbishley will have to succeed on its terms.

It’s just worrying that whilst Eggy seems understand that as well as anyone, he hasn’t been able to spend more of that biscuit-fortune of his on a few more players.

There’s been a story going on in English football for much of the past two months that has passed everybody but West Ham fans by. A club that got relegated because it did not amass enough points has been trying to get reinstated at the expense of a club that got more points.

The first club’s chairman thought that his then manager wasn’t Premiership material and that manager contrived for his team to blow a ten-point cushion by losing at home against ten men to a team that had not won for eight games after slumping to a 3-0 defeat the week before at a mid-table team with nothing to play for. The manager, as usually happens when one of them screws up spectacularly, lost his job. The chairman of this club, however, saw an opportunity to redeem his own and his club’s reputation if not his discarded manager’s, and launched a challenge to the Premier League’s disciplinary handling of a club that finished three points and three places above his own, backed by a PR onslaught.

Denying that this was the grubby pursuit of self-interest to salvage something from his own team’s failings, he called it the campaign for justice and fairness, and most of the media, starved of stories, seemingly too lazy to bother reading complicated judgements, and apparently too dishonourable to care whether what they were writing was true or not, lapped it all up. For nearly two months, the chairman and his cronies repeated what they knew were outright lies about the club they wished to displace, lies that could probably have been prosecuted under the libel and slander laws of this land. By the time they had finished, most of the media were repeating these lies as a matter of course, and showed not the slightest interest when the Premier League began an investigation into the chairman’s club for breaking the same rules that the club he was trying to relegate had been punished for, or his denial of evidence published on his own club’s website and coming straight out of his former manager’s mouth.

As a consequence the reputation of the chairman of the other club has been traduced and the club has had a difficult time in the transfer window. Beyond the world of that club, however, it, not the relegated club, is the devil that must be expunged to satisfy for our nostalgia for football done the Corinthian way.

It is difficult if you are not a West Ham fan to understand just how angry all this has made us. I have lost the genuine affection I once felt for Sheffield United as a traditional club, I have stopped reading one newspaper completely, and I have lost track of the conversations in which I have reduced non-West Ham fans to silence by pointing out facts about the Tevez affair, which have left them realising that they quite literally didn’t know what they were talking about. Not once have I, or any West Ham I know, tried to excuse what West Ham did in entering these third-party agreements and deceiving the Premier League about it them. We did wrong and we were punished. What anyone, including us, thought about the scale of the punishment is irrelevant. It was the Independent Commission of the Premier League’s business to decide. And, if as still looked likely when the Independent Commission reported, West Ham had been relegated, a £5.5 million fine on top of the loss of income that accompanies demotion to the Championship would have been an extremely weighty punishment by anyone’s standards. That this did not happen is solely the consequence of the fantastic efforts of not just Tevez but Mark Noble, Lucas Neil, James Collins, Bobby Zamora and Robert Green, none of whom, except perversely Tevez as an anti-hero, have received one iota of credit for what they achieved. Instead we are asked to accept that because these players found within themselves what they did when all had seemed lost that justice and fairness were thwarted. Even in the perverse linguistic world in which we live, the verbal gymnastics involved are quite breathtaking.

The footballing world has become a lot lonelier place for West Ham. It seems barely possible that just twelve months ago we were lots of people’s second team after the agony of the 2006 Cup final. Now nobody likes us. It is just us against everybody else. Think if you like that we did it all to ourselves, because most of us are getting to the point where we are ceasing to care whether you are interested in the truth or not. Whatever nonsense you have come to believe, just don’t ask us ever to forget just what did happen at Old Trafford on 13 May and the six weeks’ after.

Maybe one day Reo-Coker will become the player that he thinks he is already, and maybe one day he will be as self-satisfied as Lampard has been at Chelsea in thinking that we’re all a bunch of small-minded retards for not seeing it. But as you’re packing your bags Nigel, remember that you’re not the only one with ambition and maybe we just didn’t have time to wait for you to grow up on and off the pitch.

Despite what Alan Curbishley says, there is still a gaping hole in the squad – up front. Of course what every West Ham fan is vainly hoping to hear is that Tevez has told Joorabchian that he can’t bear to forgo our adoration for another year at least. Assuming that this is indeed desperate fantasy, what we now need is a striker or two. Much here depends on the true state of Dean Ashton’s fitness. This week’s noise about Everton’s Andrew Johnson makes me fret a bit. If Ashton is coming back and can get back to being the same player reasonably quickly, would we be thinking about spending reportedly crazy money for an inferior version of the same type of player? Defoe, by contrast, would be an excellent buy whatever the deal is with Ashton. I’ve never understood why Tottenham have got so little out of him. Sure he’s not the most team-focused striker around, but he’s got pace to burn and will get shots away.

As for his last months of tantrums at West Ham, I suspect we can be a forgiving lot if someone apologises, which he has, and shows our club some respect when opening their trap on matters claret and blue.

Dear West Ham haters,

I know that you would like us to apologise for avoiding relegation and depriving you of the opportunity to wheel out your clichéd sanctimony about justice having been done. Wouldn’t you all have loved it if we had gone down because Tevez missed a 90-minute penalty just as the Sheffield United and Wigan were contriving something at Bramall Lane? I have lost the will to try to explain to you all the facts about just what West Ham were and were not found guilty of again, or to remind you of the other offences that the Premier League has chosen not to punish with points deductions, or even to investigate properly. But your moral sanctimony is as hypocritical as it is futile. By every measure beyond the final chapter, this has been a catastrophic season at West Ham. We have survived a takeover bid made to line the pockets of Middle Eastern property developers, our players have succumbed to the demons of drink, drugs, violence, and gambling whilst making allegations of racism against the fans because we dared to criticise them, and our first manager this season let a complete breakdown of self-discipline derail a promising career.

As a result of the interaction of these things we lost eight games in a row without scoring for seven in the autumn and went another 10 without a win through the winter. Whilst this implosion was going on, you were all massively enjoying it because it’s always satisfying to watch a club you hate suffer and because you think West Ham fans lord it about being a special club. What better than all the footballing world turning into a weekly soap-opera to find out just how rotten and self-indulgent West Ham really are. Now that we have found a way through this devastating morass with a Chairman that although loaded with money has some sense of football values, a manager who having gone to the emotional abyss on his return to the Valley found from somewhere the mental strength to remotivate himself and his team, and a set of players who rediscovered some connection to each other and the fans, we are being massacred as the symbol of moral decline in the game, something that when everything was indeed totally rotten you all thought was addictive entertainment.

As a result of our resuscitation as a football club, we won 7 of our last 9 games and beat the Premier champions and the teams finishing 4th, 6th, 7th and 10th in doing so. Get mad about that if you like. Tell us that it all began with a non-goal against Blackburn because it did. Tell us that, despite our own efforts, we’ve got Bolton and Arsenal to thank for ending Chelsea’s quest for the Premiership because we do. Tell us that Alan Pardew gave us a parting gift in getting Robert Green signed because Green’s immense performance at the Emirates gave us three massive points that allowed us not to turn up the next week at Bramall Lane. But don’t tell us that there was something rotten in our effort for the past two months because Carlos Tevez was playing.

West Ham fans have had a glimpse of the end of the footballing road this season, when we were left with nothing but self-loathing for turning up, for still caring. The aftertaste of those months won’t quite go away, and even on Sunday Nigel Reo-Coker chose to remind us of them. The only special stuff is moments of beauty the pitch, as Tevez has blessed us with, and our solidarity with each other in the agony and the euphoria. From where we’ve been finding that there was a road part of the way back is something that we’ve every right to celebrate.

Yours
Effra

Now retaining Premiership status is within touching distance belief has become more painful than ever. Half the history of our club over the past forty years has been about dreams shattered at the last possible moment. We sing about it every week, we have learned that it is part of who we are, and yet somehow we try to believe that this time it will be different. When West Ham step out at Old Trafford next Sunday, it will be a year to the day since the newest and rawest memory of them all. The announcer had just finished telling us there would be four minutes of added time, Steven Gerrard powered the ball into the back of net, and a twenty-six year wait was about to begin all over again. I am really not sure that if it’s 1-1 at Old Trafford, Charlton are down, and Wigan are winning at Bramall Lane, and they tell us there’s four more added minutes that any part of my body will be able to take it. This relegation struggle is doing thing to my insides when I am watching football that even after more than 30 years of putting myself through the agony I didn’t know was possible.

Now I know that there are plenty of northerners out there who think that West Ham fans suffering a collective heart attack in injury time will be the perfect divine retribution, but even the residual sympathy I was managing for Wigan, Sheffield, Charlton and Fulham fans at the beginning of last week has now turned to blind rage towards Sheffield and Wigan, and the ever more ridiculous Dave Whelan in particular. There is some of this row that is just funny. The supposed media bias in favour of West Ham has led to countless journalists peddling inaccuracy after inaccuracy about West Ham for the past week, such that the Telegraph’s David Miller in his report this morning is no longer capable of reading the league table properly, and has got West Ham going down if West Ham lose and the northern conspirators play out a draw at Bramall Lane. Everyone on their sanctimonious high horse should have a check-list of facts in front of them before opening their mouth or committing themselves to print on the subject of West Ham.

West Ham deserved to be punished and they have been. I haven’t found a single West Ham fan who would tell you otherwise. But please, please can the other relegation clubs stop telling us that what is a matter of desperate self-interest on their part is a matter of justice.

First, Carlos Tevez was not illegally registered. West Ham did not break the rules on registration but on third party influence and full disclosure. Second, no club has ever been found guilty of breaking the third party rule before and so there is no precedent where a club was deducted points for the same crime with which West Ham were fined. For Whelan to claim that he ‘knows’ Wigan would have been punished for this is just preposterous. How on earth can anyone ‘know’ such a thing. This scenario isn’t just a hypothetical future that hasn’t happened, there is no past example with which to make an informed comparison. Third, this supposed anti-northern bias at the Premier League and the FA takes the biscuit. Anyone would think that the two most successful clubs over the past thirty years in English football have been from London and cheerfully cosseted by the footballing authorities and referees from scrutiny and opposition penalties.

Take one look at the Premier League’s one-day inquiry into the Howard affair if you want to see double-standards at work. Manchester United and Everton tell them there was no agreement about Howard not playing, and the mugs at the Premier League expect us to believe that Moyes got out of bed last Saturday morning and thought, ‘why don’t I give that young Ian Turner a chance, he could do with a bit of practice against Ronaldo and Rooney’.

If West Ham had been deducted points one of these clubs would have had an incredibly lucky escape from their failure to win enough points. If West Ham do stay up, one of them will have Tevez as an anti-hero for ever more. But one of these clubs may still be lucky and escape at West Ham’s expense and no doubt will never stop to remember that if West Ham’s season hadn’t descended into disaster for six months after the signing of Tevez and Mascherano then that club would have been condemned by their own inadequacies and the points that West Ham might just have managed not to hand over with barely a moment’s fight to Charlton, Watford, Wigan, Middlesbrough, Aston Villa, Manchester City and Newcastle from September to February.

If West Ham do stay up, the story will all be about Carlos Tevez, and over the past month watching him has become a pleasure that will be passed down West Ham folklore. But not for the first time, it will be the wrong story. Tevez was part of the disaster as well as the attempted rescue. West Ham’s season turned from the moment Curbishley gave Mark Noble his chance and we had someone capable of passing the ball in midfield and getting the ball to Tevez in dangerous positions. Whatever happens next Sunday, the 19-year old boy from Beckton, claret and blue through and through, is the reason that at the end of this extraordinary season West Ham fans have had some of our faith in football restored.