Morning all, a quick West Ham preview for you. Hopefully Satan brought you everything you desired yesterday and that there was plenty of food and drink to be had.
Football waits for no man, or holiday season, however, and we’ve got a London derby at West Ham as our Christmas gift. Quite what we can expect in terms of the team, I don’t really know. I’m assuming there haven’t be any new injuries since the Chelsea park-the-busathon that was inflicted on us on Monday night.
Will Laurent Koscielny make it back? I don’t know, but Thomas Vermaelen’s performance the other night was good enough for it not to be a real worry. Having been out for such a long time, due to the form of the Mertescielny axis, he was under some pressure to perform and I thought he did that pretty well.
Jack Wilshere serves the final game of his suspension, but other than that I’m assuming there’ll be a clean bill of health. The boss has options, obviously, to keep things fresh. It wouldn’t be a surprise today to see Mathieu Flamini and Santi Cazorla back in the team, and after a difficult night against Chelsea, you wonder if the return of Lukas Podolski might see Olivier Giroud given a rest. Although what a goal would do for his confidence … it’s a tricky one.
The manager has to find the balance between freshness and fatigue, player importance and player form, and there are a couple who are struggling a little bit now. Do you keep faith and hope they come through, or rest them for someone who isn’t quite as good but is eager to prove themselves? Not easy.
Both Flamini and Wojciech Szczesny have been talking about how important this run of games is over the festive period. Flamini says:
Everybody knows in December and January playing so many games means your position in the Premier League plays a big part. Of course it will be important to stay focused, to concentrate and make sure we go through this period as good as possible.
I think over Christmas time you separate the men from the boys. Over the last couple of seasons we haven’t done very well at Christmas time so being near the top of the table will give us a big motivation to push even harder this time and make sure that we get the results.
We’ve taken just 2 points from the last 9 in the league so we do need to get ourselves back on track. West Ham have been poor this season, a lot of drab games and drab draws, but we know that an Allardyce side generally finds a bit extra when they’re facing Arsenal. They’ll be physical, hard working, and dangerous from set-pieces, but we really should have more than enough to take the three points today.
Whatever about dropping points against teams like Chelsea, Man City and Everton, it would be hugely disappointing to drop them against the Hammers. If we’re to remain real title contenders these are the games we have to be winning as a matter of course. The players will know very well how they’ve gone from top of the table, with a nice little cushion, back into the chasing pack, so there’s no margin for error in games like these.
I don’t know if there’ll be a live blog for this particular game, but if it’s manageable it’ll be in the usual place. Let’s keep fingers crossed for this one, and hopefully we can start to rebuild some of the momentum we’re going need throughout this hectic period of games.
Till tomorrow.
