By Louis Nixon

West Ham’s Centre Defensive duo has persistently been berated for their performances across the last two seasons, and this evening summarises the state the Hammers are in. 

It’s not today, it’s not this week, it’s been the entire season. From the start to 20 Gameweeks in, the defence has been nothing short of a disaster, and the exclusion of Todibo today really demonstrated how poor we have been defensively because the defensive duo of Maximilan Kilman and Konstantinos Mavropanos is nothing short of an impending disaster waiting to happen every single match. 

The persistent mistakes from these two, primarily more Kilman, get more and more painful each week. Whilst the scoreline and stats totally reflect how the game truly was, as the Hammers were utterly hopeless in all aspects, these small lapse of errors ruin everything that we COULD’VE had going for us.

For example, if we turn back time to games such as Brighton (H), Bournemouth (A), penalty decisions that were caused by Kilman ultimately demolished our gameplan.. tonight, he and Mavropanos’ poor defensive interceptions or touches resulted in Magassa making a rash challenge which saw the game be dead and burried. 

It feels that every game we walk into, we are at a disadvantage before it’s already begun, and the continuation of playing both centre-backs will continue to result in misery… it has to change if Nuno truly wants West Ham to stay up, and it’s not only on him, whilst the club have been good in investing in our forward options, we seriously need to invest in central defenders and the number one target in Charlie Cresswell has to be brought in, regardless of the price they want. 

If we don’t pay the price for defenders, we’ll be paying the price for relegation, because the current defence can’t keep us up, which is shown through the fact that Wolves have now earned 50% of their points through us, and 20% of their goals scored this season have been against the Hammers… It’s simply not good enough in any way, shape or form. 

Action has to be taken if West Ham aims to win games, because at this moment in time, West Ham is on track to concede 78 goals this Premier League campaign, which would be the worst since 1967, when we conceded 85 goals in 42 games.