West Ham: whence and whither?
Hans Keller
"What's gone wrong with West Ham?" I was asked. "I don't know." Nor, I am sure, does the galaxy of football manager now ruling the club — John Lyall, the team manager, Ron Greenwood, the general manager, and ex-Spursmanager Bill Nicholson, according to Greenwood the most successful manager of our time, now West Ham's Harley Street consultant. If this triumvirate knew what was wrong, it would show clearer signs of doing something about it. Or would they? Maybe the question begs itself? John Lyall implied as much when he said the other week that he'd never said West Ham would win anything this season, he pointed out that his was, largely, a young and inexperienced team. And indeed, nobody is asking what went wrong with QPR, whom West Ham beat on Saturday — and who'd been just as exciting championship cmntenders, while they are now a mere point above West Ham.
But for one thing, a (welcome) West Ham myth has developed — around Ron Greenwood's proven love of imaginative, intelligent, foul-less, footballing football. A myth it nevertheless is, inasmuch as West Ham have not consistently followed the ideal. For another thing, West Ham's more recent record is more depressing than QPR's: five points from the last seven games, which is well below mid-table form. Moreover, the club which, under Ron Greenwood's own team-management, used to be known as an all too exclusive away side hasn't won away since November 1, when they.. beat Birmingham City 5-1, and has now accumulated five away defeats in succession.
The gap between West Ham and the West Ham myth is not getting wider: that would be simplifying a complex situation. It's widening and narrowing and widening again, as if it were the resultant of conflicting components. To consider last Saturday's win over QPR a narrowing of the gap would in itself be an over-simplification. Danny Blanchflower, the only world-class footballer amongst present-day writers on the game, and an uncompromisingly footballing footballer to boot, is sure that "the crowd enjoyed most of it. But a saner critic had to wonder about its real purpose most of the time." The two things Blanchflower approves are the "great pass" of Trevor Brooking which made Alan Taylor's goal, and the goal itself. At the moment of success, then, the gap was narrowing, but what supported that success for the pmaining eighty-nine minutes was "fast and Jrious," with the referee, "as is common nowadays," waving on "some savage tackling."
You cannot, in fact, relate West Ham's wins and losses to the narrowing and widening of the distance between their game and that dream which became reality in the shape of Brazil, 1970 — the deepest positive trauma in the life of every contemporary football enthusiast, amateur or professional, and Ron Greenwood included. The reason for this complication of the picture is simple. (Complexity can't ever be simple, but complications, self-made, usually are.) In English football which, according to my Continental sources, is the roughest in Europe (the dirtiest, in fact, according to at least one source, a Viennese cab driver), you've got to be jolly good if you want to win by being good — which means, in yet simpler terms, that you've got to have a lot of good individual players, more than tend to develop in a mechanically team-spirited age — the age of "playing for each other": of course you have to keep playing for
each other if you haven't got a gifted _leg to stand on; whereas if you have, you play for others, as well as yourself, as a matter of functional course, without the concept of working for each other ever arising: Brazil, 1970 did without it — specifically Pele, Jair and, most relevantly, Gerson, no greater distributor than whom the world has ever known. And so, over here, did the Scots Johnny White and Jim Baxter ("Gentleman Jim"), as well as Danny Blanchflower himself, all individualistic members of the same creative, altruistic midfield elite — as is Franz Beckenbauer of Bayern-Munich, nominally a defender. West Ham possess at least one heir to this tradition — two if you take the teenager Alan Curbishley into account. The adult is the selfsame Trevor . Brooking who, more often than not, evinces touchable grumpiness about our current football world-view, and you can delete "football" from this sentence so far as in concerned: what I am going on about is the inevitable, moralizing collectivism of the psychologically disabled — the constant threat of our aged age.
Eleven years ago, I went to Wembley with William Glock, a lifelong West Ham supporter (then my BBC boss) — to see his club win the European Cup Winners' Cup under Greenwood, Over a drink afterwards, we confessed to each other what we had suppressed during the match — that with all their phantasy and technique, West Ham had looked a bit soft. That criticism, alas, you can no longer make. "It was hardly surprising", says Blanchflower about last Saturday, "when Frank McLintock and Billy Jennings felled one another with a clash of heads after half an hour of the mad rush," McLintock suffering concussion.
When Greenwood had handed the team-managership to Lyall, he confessed to me that watching his team at one remove, he thought it looked a bit soft. He had concentrated on. indeed confined himself to, inventive and skilful football. I don't know John Lyall, but we know that he was a tough player, and it's obvious that he has toughened up his side. However, that's not the whole story: he has a lot of Greenwood in him too; after all, this most original of managers had been his master all along. What we — and the team — would seem to be confronted with, then, is not simPlY a polarity between the two managers, but, reflecting it, a conflict within their own minds. They are unlikely to own up to it — but it would still affect the players, perhaps all the more.
Then there is the third triumvir, Nicholson, whom I do know and admire, and who has had these same two poles to his outlook all along — on the highest level, the polarity between Jimmy Greaves and Dave Mackay in "Super-Spurs" days. Need one say more? Yes: make up your minds, gentlemen, and each other's. This weekend, you're meeting Liverpool, who seem to be going the other way — from Shanklyian, stark simplicity to subtle football. They aren't doing badly.
After Stoke City (another occasional footballing side) had, admittedly not very impressively, knocked Spurs out of the Cup at the Victoria Ground on Saturday, their manager Tony Waddington said that he wanted to play well when he won and that he wanted to play well when he lost. That's about it: it's not easy to know whether you have enough good players to win by playing well, but there is no substitute for playing well, not even winning. I don't know specifically what has gone wrong with West Ham, but we don't want them to go right the wrong way.
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