The mood among West Ham fans leaving the London Stadium on Sunday was rather like that of a group of students emerging blinking into the sunlight after a two-hour lecture.
Relieved to have got through it, they regaled one another with tales of the exact moment they drifted off and ummed and ahhed about whether or not to pop down the pub.
However crucial they might be, grim 1-0 wins over Southampton do not, it turns out, evoke extreme emotion.
A lack of showpiece successes and famous nights has been just one of many glaring failings in comparison to last term, when the Hammers beat Tottenham, Chelsea and Liverpool at home, knocked both Manchester clubs out of the Carabao Cup and toppled Sevilla and Lyon in Europe.
This season, the Hammers have won only seven times in the Premier League, the early-October win over newly-promoted Fulham standing out as the only one of those to come against a team in the top half at the time.
Otherwise, there was Steven Gerrard’s struggling Aston Villa back in August, then Wolves, earning Bruno Lage the sack, followed by Bournemouth before Christmas and Everton (the doomed Frank Lampard vintage), Nottingham Forest and Southampton since.
To call the Hammers flat-track bullies would be far too complimentary, but the more recent of those results, coupled with some helpful ones last night as Leicester, Nottingham Forest and Bournemouth all lost, have presented David Moyes’s side with an opportunity to at last put some daylight between themselves and the drop when Newcastle visit the London Stadium tonight.
To do so, though, they will have to do something they have not managed all season — beat a genuinely good team.
Eddie Howe’s side have rediscovered their mojo in recent weeks, having gone five League games without a win either side of a day at Wembley that, the manager conceded, had dominated too much of their focus.
The Magpies head to east London third, within sight of a Champions League berth, and denting their charge with three points tonight would be surely the most commendable feat of West Ham’s campaign.
A 1-1 draw at St James’s Park in February was not far off that at the time, but if the Hammers are to upset one of the big boys before the season is out, it will surely come at home, where they have taken 11 points from 15 since the turn of the year, a run without which they would be all-but down and Moyes, more than likely, sat in a beach bar with Graham Potter and Brendan Rodgers.
