Dear Hammers,
It’s hardly been at-the-edge-of-your-seat stuff in the transfer window, actually for any team, not just the most important one. It is early days, and next week will see the largest flurry of moves. As reported last week, West Ham did sign on loan one George John, who I hope receives a ball from defence and passes it crisply to attack and the back of the opposition net so that we can have a George McCartney George John John Carew moment. He is here on loan, as is Joe Dixon, who started off on the apprentice books at Manchester United but has since then played less hallowed turfs of two Turkish sides and Grays, in Essex, which plays in Corringham and has links, of course, with our own Julian Dicks. They are in the Isthmian League, which I am guessing is one step below the Blue Square Conference South and North leagues (actually Grays was relegated from it last season)…in other words, way down there. He’s a striker, and I guess someone saw something in him. He’s on the smaller side, and the guess is that Sam Allerdyce will not play him—if at all—alongside Sam Baldock but rather the much taller Carew or Carlton Cole. Dicks managed them until May last year, so maybe it is from him that this moves originates.
It makes sense, no, for the Hammers to only be offering loan deals? Sitting fairly pretty at extreme upper end of the Championship, when we get promoted, surely half or three-quarters of this team might be out of Upton Park, or the Olympic Stadium (people connected with Tottenham Hotspur are being arrested in their scores for supposed scurrilous activity such as tapping phones and spying on those whose words could influence who gets the stadium when the Olympics are over). For George John, this will just be like the countless Americans who enjoy six months studying at a British university via a program from their American one. A pleasant jaunt.
Another name on the horizon is Ruch Chorzów striker Maciej Jankowski, of and of whom which I have absolutely no knowledge. Ruch is in Upper Silesia and is fact one of Poland’s most successful teams in the 20th Century, but that really is not saying much since the early 1980s glory years of both it and the Polish national team Zbigniew Boniek and Grzegorz Lato.
Lastly, and please forgive me for touting myself, but I just published an article on London’s 2012, the Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. I could not resist putting our team in the copy (click here). Enjoy!
Should I send it to Upton Park, and to whom there?
Championship; Saturday, January 14, 2012; Fratton Park, Portsmouth, Hampshire
Portsmouth 0 West Ham Utd. 1
This match probably is not going down in history as an epic, the three points gratefully going our way via a Mark Noble penalty that the Portsmouth goalkeeper did gets his fingertips to. Noble then did that “I’m beckoning, come run with me to the corner post” thing he always does, and that was that. Portsmouth had a rally in the first 10 minutes of the second half, but they are a very average team, and we have the best defence in the league. We have ex-Hammer Tal Ben Haim to thank, too, as he played his usual graceful, highly tuned version of the Beautiful Game and manhandled Winston Reid to the ground to get the penalty in a move that would have made a Greco-Roman wrestler proud.
The Next Match
Championship; Saturday, January 21, 2012; Upton Park, East London
West Ham Utd. vs Nottingham Forest
This has to be three points. Forest—from Nottingham, the smallest city ever to win the European Cup—is in disarray, having been smashed 4-0 by Leicester in the FA Cup earlier in the week, and are one place below Millwall, which I am sure we all gleefully acknowledged lost last week 0-6 to Birmingham.
A win will put us top of the table for the first time this season, as Southampton does not play until Monday. Actually a draw would, too, but I am not even bothering to countenance that scoreline.
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