West Ham United manager Nuno Espírito Santo is changing his ways and it’s changing West Ham’s fortunes.
Fortunes always hiding? Well, it’s always been said the West Ham way is attacking football, but that really hasn’t worked for us over the years. But is it finally working for the Hammers in the Championship?
When Nuno was appointed just before the halfway point of last season, a lot of us thought he was exactly the type of manager we needed to keep us up.
And he almost was, we really improved in the second half of the season especially, it just wasn’t quite enough to topple the likes of Tottenham Hotspur and Nottingham Forest.
That was playing his usual defence first football that worked so well for him at Forest and Wolves. However, that style of football was never going to work for the Hammers in the Championship.
We saw exactly that with Nuno at Spurs, they were expected to be one of the best footballing teams in the league, dominating possession and creative tonnes of chances. But Nuno couldn’t provide that and was sacked very quickly.
So when Nuno stayed at the club instead of us taking the option to release him out of his contract, a lot of us, myself included were quite surprised, and pretty worried.
For the first few matches of this season we saw exactly that. Nuno was trying to play exactly like he was last season in the Premier League and it really wasn’t paying off.
In the first game of the season against a poor Burnley side we went 2-0 up and sat back even though we were there for the taking and threw the lead away.
Against Charlton they scored early and it completely ruined our game plan pretty much from the off, and we couldn’t break them down until it was too late.
Watford was pretty similar, they didn’t score that early but they sat off us and again we could only break them down once which was luckily enough to get a point.
Our defence isn’t good enough to sit back, and our attack wasn’t showing enough quality to break down sitting defences very easily. So Nuno had to change something, and it seems like he has.
Against Wolves he switched to a midfield two of Engels and Mukasa and we were all so surprised, surely this was too attacking for Nuno?
Well since he’s done that we’ve got three wins from three, scored ten and conceded five.
We still have a lot to work on. It is a work in progress, however, it’s a start and we’re still getting wins a couple of pretty comfortable ones at that.
Our defence is pretty poor whether we sit back or attack, so why not attack and out score the opposition instead of narrowly losing or drawing like we did against Charlton and Watford respectively.
With goals comes confidence, and with confidence usually comes better defending. Kilman looks so much better, and after a shaky start to the season Mavropanos looked better last night.
If they start to build a good relationship and we get a more settled pair of fullbacks the defence will get better, and the more the attack plays together the more they will gel.
Nuno going more attacking is clearly the way forward for West Ham, let’s hope he keeps it up and the Hammers keep on winning.
