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West Ham’s Carlton Cole - From Clown To Class

Effra can’t quite believe the performance of one of England’s forgotten starlets.

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.

Dean Aston Back For West Ham, But Please Keep Him Away From England

Effra isn’t going to get too excited about Dean Ashton just yet.

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.

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Chelsea Fiasco Highlights The Premier League’s Most Worrying Trend

Effra isn’t sure we should all be laughing at Chelsea just yet.

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.

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West Ham Fans Just Need To Temper Their Expectations

Effra is a little unsure about West Ham’s start to the season.

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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West Ham Win But Why Are The Press Still On Our Backs?

Effra is glad West Ham picked up some points, but maybe more glad that tabloid vultures are circling Tottenham now.

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.

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Raging Legal Battles, A Tough Transfer Summer, Are West Ham Fans Optimistic?

Effra does not feel refreshed and relaxed after a rather stressful West Ham summer.

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.)

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West Ham Up, Sheffield United Down, But The Damage Has Already Been Done.

West Ham may have dodged further punishment, but Effra is not happy.

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.

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No More Spending? But West Ham Still Need A Striker

Effra is happy with how the midfield is shaping up, but as usual there is still a cloud of uncertainty around the West Ham squad.

Now we know that Parker is coming, Joey Barton mercifully belongs to Newcastle, and Reo-Coker will be inflicting his whining self-pity on Aston Villa or some other club no bigger than West Ham, the transfer season has got off to a promising start. If Parker can stay fit, he is the defensive midfielder that Reo-Coker was not. One who can tackle without picking up endless bookings and pass to a team-mate when they actually want the ball.

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.

To All The West Ham Haters…

Effra has a special message for the friendly Premiership rivals.

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.

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It Is Your Fault You Will Be Relegated, Not West Ham’s

Effra is sick and tired of hearing the excuses.

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.

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Bobby Zamora Personifies West Ham’s Season

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.

Hope Just Turned Real For West Ham

Effra is fights off mental illness as the West Ham Premiership Season rollercoaster does another sickening loop.

With our one-shot win against Arsenal hope has turned into belief, and there’s no emotional hiding place left.

You can tell yourself a hundred times about ridiculous good luck, remind yourself that beating Arsenal one week and losing to Sheffield United the next is the kind of thing that West Ham have been doing for eons, or just remember that we well could stay up and then have all that heroic passion smashed to pieces by some suits meeting at the other end of town, but you won’t be able to help succumbing to the belief that the great escape is now part of the script.

I think I actually stopped trying to control myself from about the moment Bobby Zamora lofted that ball over Lehmann’s head, and I am now so far gone that I sure I’ll be able to come up with something to keep me going even if we lose next Saturday. In the end there is no other way to do relegation. You don’t get to jump off the ride just because the anxiety is threatening your physical and mental health and you’re sure you are going to be chucked off in the end anyway.

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9 Straw-Grasping Reasons Why West Ham Won’t Go Down

With the Champions League causing yet another break in any interesting Premiership action, Effra took the extra time to put a little more analysis around the not-quite-as-inevitable fate of West Ham.

Well what I thought was a two-week sojourn into the fantasy land of hope still has me in its grip. West Ham are still going down I tell myself but I am not sure that I quite believe any longer that this hope trip is nothing more than a temporarily absorbing distraction. This weekend I seriously acquainted myself with the Premiership predictor on the BBC site in which you can come up with a hundred different ways in which West Ham are staying up. I even got us in the top half of the table with one set of results. Certainly scrapping off terrible refereeing decisions and other teams’ rubbish performances might not seem like the basis for survival but getting by on the dregs can do strange things to an already deluded mind.

From my new perch beyond reality, the other teams in the relegation struggle should take note of the following:

1. Sure West Ham have to play Arsenal, Chelsea and Manchester United but 6 of our 26 points this season have come against these clubs.

2. West Ham were the last away team to win at Highbury so symmetry demands that they are the first to win at the Emirates

3. By the time Chelsea get to Upton Park, they will be in the middle of a fixture pile up, and it took them more than 90 minutes on Saturday to score against Watford.

4. Neil Warnock’s bravado is very unconvincing especially since his top scorer won’t play again this season.

5. Wigan are having no luck at the moment, and have Emile Heskey to score goals for them.

6. Aston Villa’s only win since 20 January was against us in the utter depth of our ineptitude when Curbishley still thought that Roy Carroll was a better goalkeeper than Rob Green.

7. Fulham have won once in the Premiership since 18 December, and they can’t play Newcastle again.

8. Newcastle haven’t scored in the Premiership since 10 February, and Glen Roeder is a crap manager who doesn’t seem to have noticed that they are only 6 points off the drop-zone with 21 left to play for, a fact which is not lost on their rather more mentally robust fans.

9. Charlton are staying up, and this is the point where I keep getting very stuck and will mean that when it is all over we will not be spared remembering every lurid detail about what happened to us this season.

Glimmer Of Hope, But That’s All It Is

A late (dodgy) goal has shone a light at the end of the tunnel for Effra.

It has happened. It is beyond reason, it is a detour to more misery, and, after Charlton’s win yesterday, it is already terminally ill. But it is still here: the tiniest bit of hope that went coursing through my veins on Saturday night.

I was so absolutely sure that I was beyond it this time, that nothing could happen to give it another chance, that I was so battle-weary of this season, that I was totally accepting of our fate, but hope has had its tormenting way. That it has done so because of comic refereeing incompetence on a wet Saturday evening against Blackburn only made it that much more believable, given the absurdity of this season and the inability of most of the players to rouse themselves for the fight.

Of course, West Ham are not staying up in the Premiership, and there’s a moment when we are all going to have to accept that all over again. One look at the fixture lists of other teams told me that on Saturday evening. And seeing as Charlton just might escape, there could yet be the most perfectly galling end of the season imaginable. But looking for some consolation for this renewed pact with insanity, I am telling myself football is better this way.

As West Ham fans have discovered for the last few months, football entirely devoid of hope is sado-masochistic torture. Even when you do give up, when you think that there is no lower place your club can you drag you to, they will still find it so resignation to existing misery doesn’t works either. Just for a couple of weeks, I am going to let hope have its shout.

The Problem With Reo Coker Isn’t Race

Effra chimes in on the latest slaughtering the Premiership’s most troubled club has received in the press

Race is the issue that we are going to hear a lot more about once West Ham are relegated and various players, starting with our full-of-himself captain are on their way. I have no idea what happened in the West Stand last Sunday with Reo-Coker and Shaun Newton.

I would bet as much money though as Mattie Etherington has been spinning on the dogs that this story was in the Sunday Mirror because of Reo-Coker’s agent. The unfortunate fact is that the troublesome clique that have been partly responsible for wrecking West Ham’s season are black. They are far from the only people that have landed us in this season’s catastrophic mess.

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