West Ham United have to act in the final two weeks of the transfer window, or relegation could be a very damning possibility. 

Graham Potter’s side embarrassed themselves on the opening week of the Premier League season, losing 3-0 to newly promoted Sunderland at the Stadium of Light.

The Hammers played pretty well in the first-half, but the abysmal second-half showing highlighted all the problems with West Ham United. The midfield is too slow and pretty much useless against a mobile midfield which Sunderland had. The defence is weak, we can’t create many chances in attack and Mads Hermansen had a stinker of a debut.

This shows we need to do a lot of business over the next two weeks, or I can’t see it getting much better than Saturday. In my opinion, we need two mobile central midfielders, a centre-back and a striker if we want to turn this awful start into a positive campaign.

It looks like the club are definitely going to sign at least one midfielder, but to sign another would require sales. Ideally we will sell Andy Irving, Guido Rodriguez and Edson Alvarez and replace them with two midfielders with energy, pace and ability to cover ground.

If we’re going to persist with the five at the back with two in midfield with Paqueta supporting the front three, those two midfielders have to have legs or we’ll get overrun like we saw all of last season and against Sunderland on Saturday.

We need to ditch the plan of getting a player like Harvey Elliott or Matheus Fernandes and bring in completely different midfielders. We have been linked with Ngal’ayel Mukau of Lille and Raphael Onyedika of Club Brugge, both of these would completely transform our midfield and would probably cost the same as just signing Harvey Elliott.

If Graham Potter wants to keep his job, he will make similar moves to this, otherwise he’s probably going to be out of a job before Christmas. The priority is midfield, because its the heart of the team and where we’ve been struggling for a long time. The fact we’ve gone into a new season and not addressed it all is nothing short of pathetic, and both Potter and David Sullivan have to share the blame.

Another thing we learnt on Saturday is that Max Kilman has not improved and he can’t play in the middle of a back three. After just one game everyone is calling for Mavropanos to come in for the former Wolves defender, and that says it all.

Two new busy midfielders will naturally help the defence because they will have less to do. However, it’s not just Kilman, all of our central defenders are a liability, we are screaming out for a defender in the mould of Craig Dawson or James Collins who can use their leadership qualities to really sort that backline out.

A striker shouldn’t be a priority, but if we are serious about more than staying in the Premier League this season, we need to bring a striker in that’s young and hungry. Our current striker options are Niclas Fullkrug and Callum Wilson, we can’t rely on them because of their injury history, and to be honest, neither of them fit how we want to play.

Nottingham Forest are signing Arnaud Kalimuendo from Rennes, this is exactly the type of signing we should have made this summer, a young, fast and confident goalscorer with bags of potential for a decent fee. However, that’s very unlikely to happen now, so maybe we will have to trust Callum Marshall, but then again the manager doesn’t seem to want to give him a real chance yet either.

At the very least we need to bring two midfielders in over the next two weeks, if we don’t and players like Ward-Prowse, Alvarez, Rodriguez and Soucek continue to play in this current system, Potter will be gone and we will be in real danger of being in the Championship next season.