You always have to fear playing an excellent team who are in wonderful form, but there does come a point where the prospect of breaking a streak will overtake that fear.
Man City are playing everybody off the pitch just now after a run of with 18 straight victories, while it could be 19 if they do the business in the Champions League this evening.
While that is formidable it also needs to end at some point, so West Ham should be confident of causing them some problems when they face off at the weekend.
READ MORE: West Ham could sign La Liga star this summer as Pablo Fornals attempts to persuade a former teammate to join him
David Moyes’ team have been one of the more pleasant surprises this season and they’re on a great run themselves, so it will be interesting to see if they can cause an upset.
A report from This is Futbol recently looked at some comments from Sam Delaney about the potential game plan for the weekend, and this won’t surprise too many:
“Look, City will be the favourites, and rightly so. They’re extremely hard to play against at the moment and they’re in an incredibly rich vein of form. But, the only team since the turn of the year that are in form anywhere near as good as them, is us.
“I just think this is the sort of game that Moyes and the coaching team relish because they think, ‘We’ve got nothing to lose and we’re just gonna make it tough’. I think that Moyes’ game plan will be, ‘Let’s see if we can nick this 1-0’ and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t.
“It’s not the most likely outcome and probably the most likely outcome is the City win, but I can absolutely envisage us making ourselves tough to play against and with the attacking players we’ve got – particularly [Jesse] Lingard and [Michail] Antonio – on the break, we could be an absolute nightmare and just nick this one.”
The Hammers simply don’t have the firepower to go toe-to-toe with City in a shootout here but they should cause problems on the counter and from set pieces, so if they can keep it tight early on then you never know.