McCarthyism, April 14, 2011

Benni McCarthy has left the Hammers by mutual consent, and Carlton Cole has his knuckles wrapped over Twitter comments. McCarthy—now there was good money spent. His wages plus severance works out to about $100,000 per game, and anyone who watched him completely scuff the ball when having a good opportunity to score earlier this season will remember that for that game he only played 14 minutes, making that $100,000 rise considerably. He’ll probably be picked up by some lowly Championship team, score a couple of goals and then have time off to investigate the nightclubs of Barnsley, Doncaster or Scunthorpe. Cole’s crime was to joke to his three Twitter followers that ihe immigration authorities would be out in full force outside the recent England-Ghana game, and that the only way to escape the dragnet would be to paint the flag of St. George on your face and hope for the best. This is interesting. I do not suppose that I am not ignorant of all the dire, unnecessary, primitive repercussions of racism, but it strikes me that this is a little funny as Cole is black. That said, when the flag of St. George is slapped on your boat race, doesn’t that make you white? It is a dangerous, slippery slope to laugh this all off as merely the result of people not having a sense of humour, but I do rather think a warning along the lines of, Mr. Cole, you are a professional football player (well, sometimes), and your actions do have an effect on those who might not find your humour humorous. Hopefully common sense will prevail, as it must this Saturday against Aston Villa.
I have just given Thomas Hitzlsperger the captaincy of my fantasy team from Robin Van Persie, so I am predicting a fine win for the Hammers. The supreme importance of this game must have been hammered into the boys. Another question. It’s easy to say that the international break had a profound affect on West Ham, and other more lowly teams, as we have lost two games since it, with two goals for (both being penalties) and seven against. Is it such a royal pain? I’d say it might be, for training with international squads is different than training for domestic teams and quite often West Ham Players merely warm the bench or do not even make the team, merely the squad.

Bolton Wanderers 3 West Ham Utd. 2 (English Premiership), Saturday, April 9, 2011.
It is hard for me to do an analysis of this game, although our defending looked shocking, as the computer feed we watched this game on was iffy to say the best. Annoyingly, the action (inverted commas as far as the Hammers were concerned) kept jumping back, just so that we could see how bad we were three times. We all sort of drifted off, as we recognized pieces of tameness we had seen before. That said, we certainly looked better in the second half, and Demba Ba was unlucky not to score with a superb hooked shot to the crossbar and a header brilliantly saved by the Bolton goalie.
Man of the Match—Honestly, who could say? Did anyone stand out?