Under pressure: David Moyes will have questions to answer if West Ham don’t improve results soon
(Picture: REUTERS)When David Moyes sought to quantify the ambition shown by West Ham in the transfer market this summer, one of his prime metrics was international caps.
“We’ve signed a German international, an Italian international, a Brazilian international,” the Scot said last month, and the point has been hammered home by the Irons’ far-reaching representation in national sides over the past fortnight.
Gianluca Scamacca impressed for Italy against England, for whom Declan Rice continues to be a crucial figure. Thilo Kehrer played right-back for Germany at Wembley, while Lucas Paqueta started both games for Brazil. Even Alphonse Areola made a rare outing in goal for France, with Hugo Lloris injured.
The growing assembly of star power has made the Hammers’ sluggish start to the season all the more perplexing. Moyes’s side return to Premier League action at home to Wolves tomorrow in the relegation zone, with five defeats and a single win from their opening seven games.
One report this week claimed Moyes is already under significant pressure to turn results around or face a battle to save his job. The sack would be harsh, given the wonders he has worked in his second spell at the club, and bizarre, given the backing he was afforded this summer, though, as Thomas Tuchel’s departure at Chelsea showed, a bunch of supermarket receipts do not make much of a shield.
The chief frustration among fans has been an apparent reluctance on Moyes’s part to throw his new signings into the line-up wholesale; the Hammers boss insistent that, where possible, they must be given time to bed in and adapt.
Scamacca, a £30.5million signing from Sassuolo, has become Exhibit A in the argument, having started just once in the League, despite scoring three times in four games in Europe.
Surely, though, with Michail Antonio in action with Jamaica in New Jersey into the early hours of Wednesday, it will be Scamacca who gets the nod to face Wolves in a game which, domestically at least, must mark the start of West Ham’s season proper.
A month on from the close of the transfer window, with his team yet to fire, Moyes can no longer afford to persist with the gently, gently approach.
Starting tomorrow, West Ham play 13 times in 44 days before the season breaks for the World Cup, a run across which Moyes will need his entire squad.
They are well on their way to qualification in Europe already, and a few dead rubbers among that baker’s dozen would not go amiss. In the Premier League, however, Moyes needs his star power to come to the fore.
