Pardew Support Was Never In Doubt

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Effra welcomes the quiet that follows three points.

Goals in the Premiership, three points, and a half-decent performance, albeit with the obligatory four minutes of hell, has made a lot of very happy Hammers.

Given the upcoming fixture list, no one of course should get carried away. But Pardew, the players, and the fans all made their point yesterday. For the moment anyway the club still belongs to us and not to the media or Joorabchian. For its part the media can find another crisis club for the week. Sky and the horde of press thought that they were coming to gawp at the last rites and you could almost see them polishing their funeral orations but from the first blistering chorus of ‘Alan Pardew’s claret and blue army’ they’d come with the wrong script.

That the media really didn’t get after the Chesterfield debacle shows just how much support Pardew has retained during this West Ham crisis. (The Evening Standard’s Matthew Norman was the honourable exception)West Ham fans know which players have been letting Pardew down and they have plenty of ideas about why that don’t tell against Pardew. They also know that West Ham go out of the Carling Cup every other season to a team from a lower division.

Most of us still think we’ve got the most promising young manager in the Premiership. Better copy of course if the fans are baying for blood but it was just lazy journalism not see that West Ham fans were going to stand and fight for Pardew. Indeed all the media crap last week just made us even more determined since at West Ham we don’t take kindly to outsiders telling us how we feel. As for Brown and Joorabchian, I hope they were listening hard. Yesterday was a properly West Ham kind of day, football the way we do it: unpredictable, passionate, and resolutely loyal to our own.

The fight for Alan Pardew ain’t over yet.