The Current Squad

Who Plays for Your Favourite Team? Terence Baker Fearlessly Finds Out.

No. 1—Valon Behrami (shirt no. 21)

West Ham supporters traditionally love attacking midfielders, those dauntless players able to collect the ball at the halfway line, dance towards the opposition, skip around at least four of them and either lay off the perfect pass to a goalscorer or dispense with said goalscoring prowess altogether and just to do the job themselves. Notable examples of this type of player have included Paolo di Canio, Trevor Brooking, Ian Bishop and my favourite player of all time, Alan Devonshire, a man who used to catch the District Line underground to home matches he was playing in. So, it was just a shame that Valon Bahrami fitted none of these characteristics when we first saw him put on the famous claret n' blue. He is Albanian, albeit a Swiss national now, and he did come all over as rather shellshocked. It's understandable. He comes from a country that one was ruled by a King Zog, which means King Bird in Albanian. However, since his inauspicious beginnings, Behrami has stretched his wings phoenix-like to becoming a firm crowd favourite and evern scoring the opening goal against Hull City in a recent match. His work effort is magnificent, and as that often results in clever play, the crowd in recent weeks has got even more behind him. Fans of Italian club Lazio love him, too, for he once scored the winner against Rome rivals Roma, and there is little more important in the Eternal City than that game, and in this, he adds his name to that other West Ham and Lazio champion, Paolo di Canio, who loves West Ham but has Lazio light blue in his veins. I once was in a bar frequented by socialists and communists just behind the Termini rail station in Rome. It is called Treinta e Due, that is, 32, and it's in the San Lorenzo district, which is wonderfully shady, in every meaning of that word. I walked up to the bar, and the bar man asked me, on hearing my accent, what was my team. Not, what do you want to drink, but what was my team. "West Ham," I replied. A change came over him, he jumped over the bar, raised both hands, smiled and hugged me. "Paolo di Canio," he said (even though Di Canio has often being accused of supporting facism), "I'm Lazio! You pay for nothing. Your money is no good here." So that was a wonderful, perfect evening in Rome, the sun still warm and the faces happy, sipping beer for free, talking football and politics and hoping the fascist bar across the road did not fire-bomb us.