It is typical that having navigated a hectic start to the season with a remarkable run of good fitness fortune, it is a fortnight without a game that has the potential to throw up David Moyes’s first real injury headache of the campaign.
Jarrod Bowen and Michail Antonio, one or the other of whom has started up-front in all 12 of West Ham’s Premier League games this term, have both returned from international duty nursing knee problems, neither overly serious but worrying enough between them to throw a lack of centre-forward depth into sharp focus.
Assuming both are missing for Saturday’s trip to Turf Moor, David Moyes will - among his senior players at least - appear to have a straight choice between two former Burnley forwards to lead the line. Given the struggles of both Danny Ings and Maxwel Cornet, without a League start or goal between them in six months, it does not feel a particularly enticing one.
Moyes, then, will be hoping desperately that Bowen, the leading English scorer in the division, is back quickly, but even the idea of the 26-year-old’s absence in tandem with that of Antonio (who is out for around three weeks) has offered a glimpse of the ease with which the Irons’ attacking resources might be stretched thin, if not numerically, then certainly in terms of quality.
Having not directly replaced Gianluca Scamacca in the summer, a dip into the January market was already a possibility, but with 11 matches in the next 39 days, Moyes could well end up needing a solution sooner. Suddenly, this feels a pivotal period in the young career of Divin Mubama.
Mubama, an 18-year-old forward with a big reputation, has been on the fringes of Moyes’s first-team for some time, making his debut and scoring his first goal last term, and featuring as a substitute as recently as the Europa League victory over Olympiacos earlier this month.
Having outgrown youth football, though, he is yet to feature in the Premier League this season and is now in the midst of a contract stand-off, his current deal up next summer and the club’s offer of a new one so far turned down.
Moyes has been effusive in his public praise of Mubama and urged the youngster to sign up, warning of the “big mistakes” made by the string of academy graduates to have left the club in recent years, only to find the grass elsewhere a paler shade of green.
The Scot has pled patience, pointing out that few 18-year-olds are playing regular football in the Premier League and fewer still at centre-forward. Only two teenagers - Evan Ferguson at Brighton and Burnley’s Lucas Kolesheo - have started half of their team’s league matches this season. Rico Lewis, perhaps the outstanding English talent of his age-group and already called up to Gareth Southgate’s squad, has started just two for Manchester City.
Mubama’s predicament, though, is that appearances of any kind, in any competition, have been hard to come by; three substitute cameos this term include two that began in the 89th minute of Europa League matches and a longer run-out against third-tier Lincoln City in the Carabao Cup. If the minutes to be filled by Antonio’s absence do not trickle down, Mubama could be forgiven for wondering when an opportunity might arrive.
Perhaps the day will come when he does indeed seek it elsewhere and perhaps Moyes will be proven right in his sense that a clearly talented player is not yet quite ready. Frankly, he is far better placed than any of us to know. But perception matters and at a club that takes pride in calling itself the Academy of Football it is vital that young players see a more open pathway, no graduate having managed to earn a prolonged crack at first-team football since Ben Johnson made his breakthrough three seasons ago, for all some have jumped ship of their own accord sooner than West Ham would have liked.
Finding space to blood young talent has, in fairness, not been easy. In the League, each of the past four seasons have seen West Ham fighting either for Europe or survival until late in the campaign. Having built a squad deep enough to cope with competing on the continent, Moyes has a hard enough task keeping a fringe of senior internationals sufficiently involved, without throwing fledgling talent into the mix.
But with the club’s most exciting crop of youngsters in two decades, convincing winners of last season’s FA Youth Cup no less, about to start knocking on the door, he must find a way soon.
