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Comments
Brilliant
IMO the free kick Fab may have been a bit too far across but fair play for the quality of the strike. I don’t think it’s a clanger by any stretch
Oh and I loved that camera angle when you could see our players and staff celebrating the winner on the benches.
Great result and maybe enough to instill the confidence needed to get out of another fine mess we find ourselves in (cue Laurel and Hardy) to be fair, I was not hopeful during the first 20mins as Antonio was totally isolated up top, I could not see us holding out and as for scoring ourselves......
Good fight back after the disallowed goal and Diops blooper, Overall Antonio was a beast and he worked so hard all game, Rice and Bowen once again showed up and Soucek put in a proper shift but I am not sure that Fornals did very much, looks terrified of the ball.
Lanzini was better but still a shadow of his prior self - I see calls for a point against the barcodes, I see them standing in the slips, straining upon the start and upon this day let’s get all three points up there and breath a bit easier.
Proud of them today
if we were playing the predictor game.
The main two reasons why we won, was that Noble wasn't playing, and Antonio
gave a brilliant non stop performance.
Ogbonna made a big difference & Antonio; what a performance. Never convinced by him up front, but he was brilliant. Haller in for Lanzini & that would be our best 11 I think last night; Anderson/Yarmo/Lanzini as impact subs.
Diop had nowhere to go and the septic deliberately ran/dived into him, in fact he was already airborne when he made contact.
If it had been us, the player would have been told to get up, not unlike Antonio who was twisted round by Rudiger but nothing given, but fair play to him for getting up and scoring.
Bowen seems to be our buy of the season, really like his work ethic and it was his corner and pass that led to our first two goals (and also his corner for the ridiculously disallowed one).
And as Hammerex said "the main two reasons why we won, was that Noble wasn't playing, and Antonio gave a brilliant non stop performance".
Let's hope we can carry this to Newcastle, although I think their defence won't be so generous.
COYI
"The Noble injury was crucial, as finally West Ham get to play a game with an 11 man team.
It may sound harsh, but all WH fans will know what I'm talking about - nice guy etc, but shouldn't have been on the pitch for years now."
Antonio still isn't a CF, and that was a 1 in 10 performance as one; in the other 9 games he's largely ineffective as a CF (not in any way suggesting he can't and doesn't impact games, just that he's much more effective when he hasn't got his back to goal which he usually has when he's played as an isolated, one-up-front CF).
The downside of last night's performance is it will give G&S an excuse to, yet again, leave us short of quality up front as "Antonio can do a job as a back up CF". We've had one CF all season; Antonio starts ahead of all of the others, not because he's great up there by himself, but because the alternatives (Ajeti, Silva etc) aren't deemed good enough.
Playing Antonio as a CF hurts us twice; he's generally not that effective in that role, yet we lose his pace and power from a deeper starting point and with his face to goal. Really worried that G&S will use last night's performance to stitch us up in the transfer market again.
Think Nobes has had his day as a starter, but don't like the vitiol directed at him...Rice stepped up as captain (hopefully for us rather than to impress Frank.)
Yarmo combined better with Fredericks than Bowen did, but hard to drop Bowen.
Decisions, decisions.