Edge fitness derby12/28/2023 His shot hit Romero, then it hit Davies and came back towards the Spurs goal where Bowen had arrived following his initial run and pass. West Ham were forced back narrow and deep, but they shut down the channels probed by Heung-Min Son and Kulusevski.īowen created the first West Ham goal, wrestling the ball off Romero and then following in his pass to Kudus. Porro and his fellow full-back Udogie were high. Pierre-Emile Hojbjerg started in midfield, thrust back into favour by the injuries, and yet it was still very much a Postecoglou approach. The second-choice West Ham goalkeeper was in place of Alphonse Areola who was nursing a wrist injury but other than that it was the full-Moyes XI. He must have connected somewhere around the penalty spot with Pedro Porro’s corner in the 11th minute and put it in the one place that Lukasz Fabianski was never going to reach. West Ham had gone behind to a perfectly-placed header from Romero, returning from the red card suspension earned against Chelsea. It leaves West Ham just six points off Manchester City in fourth place in a top nine all within 12 points of one another. “We did a good containing job on them,” he said and that laid the groundwork for what was to come after half-time. He saw the half-time deficit as a “really good 1-0” given the quality of the opposition. Very different for Moyes, who could afford to be generous in victory, describing Spurs as being “as good as any team in the Premier League at the moment”. Certainly he felt the full caprice of this club that struggles with the reality of its situation and how it can often fall well short of its vaulting ambition: there were boos at the end. One senses he sees how this is going – a manager who prizes the aesthetic above the result - and he does not like it. Postecoglou kept returning a central thesis – that winning was the only benchmark and the entertaining football that accompanied it was just a means to that end. “I don’t think it’s because of the ref we lost the game,” he said. Postecoglou said he had no idea why that protest might have taken place. The Var John Brooks checked a late handball claim against Kurt Zouma but decided against a review. It is nigh on impossible to replace as towering a figure as Harry Kane, although these are the nights when you imagine he would have steered his team through.Īt the end Dejan Kulusevski had to be held back by his team-mates from confronting the referee Michael Salisbury for grievances which were not immediately clear. That Spurs gave up these goals was, for the second at least, a case of a mistake from Destiny Udogie – and yet by then the game should have been settled. ![]() Fleeting opportunities turned into something much greater by the hard-running from Bowen and Mohammed Kudus who were prepared to chase the ball up the pitch and count on getting the returns. The two goals Moyes’ players eventually scored were chiselled out of nothing by his forwards. A single-goal lead at half-time he said “was not a good performance … we should have been three or four goals up” and he was proven right by the end of it.Īn embattled West Ham found their feet in the second half and sensed that Spurs would cough up the chances. He declared his side “really poor in both boxes” with the chances they failed to take, and then those they gave away. Postecoglou would emphasise later that the attacking football must take second place to a winning habit. This time, however, the single first-half goal from Cristian Romero felt like a rather meagre return on their dominance. ![]() Once again Postecoglou’s players started like a side that looked sure they had all the answers. That is one point from the last five games for Postecoglou in the Premier League and that sequence of taking the lead in every one of those four defeats and single draw is a record for the league. From a dominant first half siege by Spurs to a desperate chasing of a game and a looming defeat they could never quite come to terms with. Jarrod Bowen and then James Ward-Prowse scored second-half goals that spun the game out of its orbit. They came, they saw, they counter-attacked. West Ham’s possession-count never got above 25 per cent but with chances like these, David Moyes’ players could afford to be patient. The Ange Postecoglou revolution was always destined to be a wild ride, although the fifth consecutive lead thrown away in the Premier League has come to suggest a pattern of surrender that is threatening to define these fragile early months.
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