Having watched his Bristol City team knock West Ham out of the FA Cup last night, manager Liam Manning was keen to play down the significance of the Premier League side’s attacking absentees.
“Not when you see what’s coming in in place of them,” Manning said, when asked whether the fact that Jarrod Bowen and Lucas Paqueta had succumbed to injury in the original tie gave his side fresh belief ahead of the replay at Ashton Gate, a response that really ought to have drawn more of a chuckle.
“They’re swapping Premier League players with Premier League players,” he went on to add, which is, technically, true, in much the same way that swapping the Christmas turkey for a packet of Fridge Raiders would be replacing poultry with poultry.
For all Konstantinos Mavropanos’s error proved decisive, gifting Tommy Conway the evening’s only goal, the Hammers were ultimately made to pay for their failure to put more than one goal past a mid-table Championship defence across the course of 180 minutes.
For the second half of those, they were reliant on a reserve forward line whose best form lies in forgotten books gathering dust on shelves. In the cases of Danny Ings and Maxwel Cornet, who really ought to have combined for an opener a full 10 seconds before Conway scored his, this was yet another evening in keeping with the trend of two West Ham careers that have never ignited. In Said Benrahma’s, though, it may prove the final act in one that promised so much more.
On the same day as transfer interest in France materialised in the form of a rejected loan offer from Marseille, the Algerian was sent off before the hour for a ridiculous kick-out at Joe Williams, one that left his side a man down and unable to apply any serious pressure to a home defence that might have succumbed in sight of such a success.
While he has been demoted to the fringes since Mohammed Kudus’s summer arrival, this was still Benrahma’s 22nd appearance of the season and still he is without a goal since scoring perhaps his most important, from the penalty spot in Prague in June.
That the frustration, then, that sparked his petulant reaction might have had roots a little deeper than Williams’s poor tackle seconds earlier is hardly a far-fetched theory, particularly as he has been on the end of plenty worse but never previously seen red in his career.
One glorious flick, back-heeled on the volley, to set Emerson clear down the left had by that stage offered a fleeting glimpse of the talent that brought such a pure footballer from west London to east three-and-a-half years ago.
A Brentford highlights clip shared on his own Instagram page this month, though, also served as a reminder that Benrahma was once a player about more than the trade-off between frustration and flair, one of so much more incision and end product.
The 28-year-old ought really to have been moved on before now, but with Lyon keen as well as Marseille, a departure by the end of the month, even at cut-price, would surely suit all parties. Strangely, a three-match suspension may simplify the equation, with Benrahma now out of contention until the middle of next month, by which time Moyes’s injury crisis is expected to have eased.
On this hardly surprising evidence, it cannot do so quickly enough.
