Effra wrote this even before to the whole ‘halftime racism show‘ thing, which sort of sums up West Ham’s season really.

There are times when football’s capacity to astonish is simultaneously a terrible and wonderful thing.

A day that started off like West Ham’s Sunday when the newspapers hit the internet, indeed a week that had lurched from disaster to disaster through the whole gamut of West Ham’s problems this season, could not possibly have as its end that game and that last few minutes, could it?

Sunday lunchtime I wouldn’t have thought that West Ham could possibly find any new way this season to skin us emotionally, but by 6 o’clock I was wrong for the umpteenth time this season. There really are no limits to the way a football club can make you miserable, and nobody’s imagination is up to it, however many times you think that you’ve been there, done that.

And yet, twenty-four hours later, I am thinking it was a different kind of day. So we are going down, Tottenham of all clubs got the satisfaction of putting the final nail in the coffin, and Anton Ferdinand has found new ways to disgrace our club. But we were also part of a game of football that showed what the Premiership can be about rather than the overpriced predictability that is driving away fans who have made watching football part of their lives for decades. And just for a joyous, headless moment as Tevez and us became one, we got to remember just what an exhilarating feeling football can let loose.

It never lasts, not even if you support a team that hasn’t made the kind of pact with madness stitched up in E13 over the summer, but if you can’t take it even when it turns out not to make the slightest bit of difference, then there’s no point being a football fan at all.

Dear Alan,

You have said that you have appreciated the letters and messages that you have had from West Ham fans and so I thought that you might not mind another after our humiliation at your hands on Saturday. I would guess that writing this letter down the black-hole of the internet is less likely to have the zero impact on its intended recipient than the endless encouragement that I and my fellow fans have directed at West Ham players this season has had. The more we sing to them, the more annoyed it seems they all get, especially when Mervyn Day starts pushing them to come over and show some appreciation before scurrying of the pitch to their mutual excuse pact. I still like to think though that you care rather more about our impending relegation than the players wearing the shirt.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

Effra rues the innovation that made it impossible to look away.

With West Ham not being able to lose this week, however hard they could have tried, I’ve had the most enjoyable weekend for a long while.

But even when there isn’t crap defending to watch and non-existent shooting to lament, there was still in the 24-7 media-football world plenty to wind me up. On Saturday it was stories of Anton partying for his birthday in America on Knees up Mother Brown, and of the Ice Man gratuitously stoking things up with Pardew all over the place.

By Sunday the Ice Man’s target had turned to Curbishley and supposedly in three games time we’ll be welcoming (or not) the bottom half of the duo responsible for England’s atrocious recent performances to Upton Park. Hate to say it but the only cheer that the media brought yesterday was the news that we are not the only team in the Premiership this season whose players can keep the red-tops occupied. Just when I had concluded that there was nothing that West Ham couldn’t come up with, at least, I realised, the feuding players haven’t started trying to injure each other with golf clubs.

Of course, we all love having access to all the gossip, pseudo-information, and once in a while the truth about our clubs, but I wonder if it hasn’t just made being a fan become even more stressful. Forums are great for sharing emotion with fellow fans in immediate moments of pleasure and pain, but being able to tap into football whenever we like means that we’re never rid of it, and in a season like this one of West Ham’s, what wouldn’t we sufferers all give to be able to get our minds off football for as long amount of time as possible.

Ever watched someone slowly descend into madness? Effra shows us how its done as West Ham continue to wreak havoc with innocent lives.

So Carroll is still in goal, the gods are still mightily pissed with us, the threat of Premiership points deduction now looms for the club’s pact with that footballing devil Joorabchian, Alan Pardew’s ghost haunts Upton Park, and the tide of discontent against Curbishley has indeed turned to open fury on the message boards.

In any season that was readily comprehendible, it would be preposterous for the Board to think about sacking Curbishley. But so far has the West Ham story this season departed from what are taken to be football’s conventional wisdoms that normal common sense can no longer apply.

Of course, Curbishley objectively deserves more time, and, of course, nobody can hold him accountable for two players in a week getting injured on their debuts. But it is increasingly hard to deny that he has become part of the problem and that his particular character does not appear suited to the demands of managing West Ham at this moment in time.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

Effra, surprisingly still somewhat sane after the Hammer’s season so far, loses patience with West Ham’s man with the (supposed) plan.

If Curbishley doesn’t recall Robert Green on Tuesday, then the tide of scepticism rising around Upton Park about his management is in danger of bursting into open fury. God knows most of us want to like Curbishley because he is one of our own.

Everyone also recognises that he came into a hornet’s nest of problems. But his team selections are getting harder and harder to understand, starting with his frankly incomprehensible preference for Carroll over Green. Anyone who watched our two goalkeeper’s performances this season could have told Curbishley that when Carroll comes for balls like the one that led to Watford’s goal he tends to miss them, and that Green deals with them well. Carroll is poor with crosses and poor at distribution. Green commands his box and distributes the ball quickly and intelligently. Carroll is also one of the players who have helped derail our season with his personal self-indulgence. Argumentative lot as we are, I don’t know one West Ham fan who doesn’t prefer Green to Carroll.

[Read the rest of this entry »]

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 »]