The message coming out of West Ham at the start of the week was there would be no decision on the future of David Moyes until the end of the season. Yet by the time Pablo Fornals was beating two AZ Alkmaar defenders and running through to score in the 94th minute at the AFAS Stadion on Thursday night, it seemed absurd that anyone could possibly want to replace the manager.
They were all off the bench when Fornals drove his low shot into the net, their reward for not treating the Europa Conference League as an inconvenience being a place in the final against Fiorentina. In those moments it was worth remembering that West Ham have put up with a lot of rubbish for much of their existence. This is the good stuff and, even if the standard of the Conference League has not been high, nobody who cares about West Ham was going to be sniffy about reaching a European final for the first time since 1976.
