I’m not going to lie, the obvious move here would’ve been to simply copy and paste last season’s blog for West Ham away and add a couple extra goals but alas, I will be writing an entirely new piece.
Of the weekend’s football, one game in particular stood out to me. Watching Tottenham take on Manchester United, I was blown away by just how good Spurs looked. Freed from the shackles Antonio Conte had on them last season, they’d put down a marker, not least due to the fact that they’d lost their greatest ever player just eight days before.
It’s been a positive week to be a Chelsea fan as far as transfers go. The arrivals of both Moisés Caicedo as well as Roméo Lavia have done much to bolster our midfield. Michael Olise signing a new four year deal at Palace provided one of the shocks of the window having been linked with a move to one of Chelsea or City. Elsewhere, in quite possibly the most typical Chelsea thing ever, Reece James picked up a hamstring injury.
I’ll run out of verbatim before I can finish describe just how much I hate the location of West Ham’s stadium.
Having been dissatisfied by our previous years meets at a Wetherspoons deep in East London, and eager to change our fortunes, I opted for “Parcel Yard” in Kings Cross Station as our pre-game pub of choice.
The outside-inside beer garden was comparable to a greenhouse on the hottest day of the year, only made worse by quite possibly the flattest pint I’ve ever been served in zone 1. Discussion was heated to say the least, one key topic being myself and Dad debating the true value of Harry Kane’s new lifetime contract with Sketchers. Dad, an avid buyer of their brand was insistent that Harry was due a fortune. Myself, still carrying scars from having had a pair in year five for sports at school, had other ideas.
By far the best feature of the pub was the alternative transport it offered to Stratford. Instead of a slightly arduous journey on the underground it offered the opportunity to travel on HS1 (High Speed 1). 30 minutes after leaving the pub I already found myself in the London Stadium. A feat made all the more impressive by some dodgy navigation by yours truly through Westfield shopping centre.
Thankfully, as season ticket holders we were once again assigned seats in the lower tier of the London Stadium. Unfortunately, they were as far along as possible and whilst being directly behind the goal, they were located directly on the border between Chelsea and West Ham fans.
To say this created a slightly tedious experience would be an understatement for 90 minutes we were subjected to back and forth between the Chelsea and West Ham fans. Whilst this was fun for about 5 minutes, there’s only so many times you can hear the people around you offer the West Ham fans outside and vice-versa before it gets a little bit grating.
When you combined our abhorrent away record of late (not least at the London Stadium) with the fact that this was West Ham’s first home game, there was certainly slight cause for concern. People will continually cite the huge amounts of money we’ve spent under Todd Boehly as justification for immediate success. The reality is we’ve bought a lot of young players, some of whom are injured at the moment and the rest are certainly not bedded into the first team squad. I did feel the lineup was slightly disappointing, so many of our good performances in pre-season had come from playing a dynamic 4-2-3-1. Circumstantially, the injury of Nkunku has prevented us deploying a similar set up thus far.
The game started poorly. We know just how deadly James Ward-Prowse can be from free-kicks after his wonderful goal against us at Stamford Bridge last year so it was frustrating to see us give up multiple corners so cheaply early on. James Ward-Prowse delivered immediately on his home debut, perfectly flighting the ball onto Nayef Aguerd’s head. 1-0 after just six minutes.
I do feel we played very well in the first half after the early set-back. In true Chelsea fashion, minutes after Carney Chukwuemeka’s brilliant finish, he was down on the turf clutching his knee. As an isolated incident, it’s not nice to see. Looking more widely at it however, it gets worse. There has been a sickening number of knee injuries to players given how early into the season we are and I suspect it has something to do with the fact that top players are being subdued into the best part of 65 matches a season. Their bodies simply cannot cope.
Raheem Sterling had one of his best games in a Chelsea shirt yesterday despite the fact he didn’t score. Overall he looked far less predictable and a lot more dynamic on the ball. The wait will have to go on for Enzo Fernández to grab his first goal for Chelsea although his penalty wasn’t the worst I’ve seen. Above all all else it was an excellent bit of guesswork and subsequent save from Alphonse Areola but that doesn’t make it any easier to watch back.
Half-time presented us with some rather sizeable queues for some liquid refreshment although it was sorely needed after the hostile placement of our seats, missed penalty and losing another player to injury.
Their second goal makes for painful viewing. Thiago Silva was nowhere to be seen, leaving Michail Antonio to make light work of both Axel Disasi and Levi Colwill as he smashed one of his five Premier League goals this season past Robert Sánchez. At the other end of the pitch, Nayef Aguerd was lucky not to go from hero to villain as he received a second yellow card for a poorly timed challenge on Nicholas Jackson. Jackson again looked bright on the ball but suffered from the formation.
With 87 minutes gone on the clock, and fully aware of the trials that lay ahead to leave the Olympic Park, we bid an exit from the stadium along with a few hundred others. It may be in London, but there honestly aren’t many worse grounds to be playing at on 4:30pm on a Sunday afternoon. This proved to be a stroke of genius as it allowed us to immediately get a train back to Kings Cross, all whilst missing a third West Ham goal via a Lucas Paquetá penalty. Win win.
I’ve seen the video of the penalty, and obviously, I was not impressed by the Moisés Caicedo cameo. But the reality is that this is a player who missed almost the entirety of Brighton’s pre-season due to his transfer speculation, so it will take him a little while to get back into the swing of things. A real pain, but it is what it is. With that enormous transfer fee looming over his head, I think if anything it was better to get this performance out of the way early and will hopefully relieve some pressure.
The mood in the St. Pancras International Wetherspoons post-game was depressing to say the least. Before the game I realised that I’ve not seen us win an away game since Real Madrid at the Bernabeu in April 2022 and that wait will be going on. There were still a number of positives to take from the game and we certainly created the chances to win it. Ultimately, that’s been the story here for a number of years now though and it will be up to Mauricio Pochettino to change those fortunes.
There should be no excuses to not play a back four and absolutely blow Luton Town out of the water on Friday night, so I’ll see you there.
The Shed Diaries 