Window dressing

OLAS 465 September 19th 2009

“It was a very successful transfer window. Despite high levels of interest and very tempting offers from top clubs, both here and on the continent, we managed to hold on to Nigel Squashy and Jonathan Spectator,” said West Ham Chief Executive Scoff Ducksbrain. excitedly. “We can definitely challenge for fourth place (from the bottom) now”

OK, I made it up, but it’s not terribly far from the grim truth. After the miserable experience of recent windows I vowed to myself not to become one of those “Brainless Barneys”, logging on to the internet every few minutes in the days just before the window ended, to see which ever-more-unlikely international star we were linked with only to end up being utterly disappointed and despondent. But there I was, eager for each new snippet of empty speculation. I wanted so much to believe that we were going to a splash many millions on players even though all seemed to be saying they would rather stick their head up a dead bear’s arse than play for us. I knew, or thought I knew, that any negative comments attributed to them would all be revealed as paper talk, and really they were dying to play for the happy hammers.

As the great American folksinger Peter Seeger said in 1963: “When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?” . Well I’ve learned fuck all it seems. Like my one-time addiction to sherbert lemons, I want to stop but I can’t. I’ve got to be strong. OK, next window I won’t pay any attention at all. I’ll just turn the other way and tell my compute to stop bothering me, then check it on February 1st to see if anything happened.

Or maybe I might check once or twice, or maybe…

The end result of the summertime to-ing and fro-ing is that while many of the teams we have to see realistically as our competitors were strengthening their squads, we have made little difference to ours. We’ve lost a truly tenacious and reliable centre back, popular with the fans despite his ginger hair, for a considerably higher price than we paid. In his place we have gained a younger model who has played for his country at under-21 level. And we’ve sold one of our stars of the future, an exciting young player with a lot of potential who, it would seem, never really settled in East London and brought in a more experienced player – Allesandro Diamianti – with, we are told, a sweet piede sinistro (left foot).

Hopefully he will turn out to be a real Diamanti geezer, and he certainly fills one important role – a player who can take wicked free kicks from 25/30 yards range. Mark Noble can and does take them from there but they are always over the bar or at the wall, so in that sense having Diamanti is a plus. But at the same time I can’t share the views expressed on various Hammers fans’ sites, who seemed more than pleased to see the back of our Ugandan-born purchase from Italy, Savio Nsereko.

Savio rarely got a look in, but the few times I saw him play I saw a skilful but unconfident player trying his best. I also had more selfish reasons for wanting him to succeed. If West Ham has been part of my life for nearly 45 years, Uganda has been a significant factor in my life since I first went there for five weeks work in 2001. I have been back since, maintain contact with friends there, and am learning Swahili – spoken by many Ugandans and more widely in East Africa. I’m also the proud owner of a Ugandan under-21 football shirt, though if I’m really honest I would have to acknowledge that I’m neither Ugandan nor under 21. (Unlike Dean Ashton I am under 21-stone though.)

It used to puzzle me how these two vital and indispensable aspects of my life could every possibly come together, and when we bought Savio, for a moment I glimpsed it. Anyway that dream has gone but I sincerely hope he succeeds back in Italy. Savio – bahati njema (“good luck” in Swahili). And I hope that his problems in settling down in London were down to him and not because the club wasn’t looking after him properly.

We could do with a bit of “bahati njema” ourselves. Of course, It’s early days, but four points from four outings mainly against struggling clubs and providing such little threat in front of goal, despite Zola’s attacking ambitions, is a piss-poor start to what could turn out to be a long, tough season. Having Behrami back in contention is an enormous plus. Having Dyer out of contention with an injury is just par for the course. We have missed Behrami’s skill, pace and drive. He may need a few more games before he is back to his best but that can’t come soon enough.

It seems ages since we’ve played at Upton Park but that last outing was a rather intense, controversial even! It was the Millwall game We were second best for 85 minutes playing slow, predictable, unimaginative football, against determined opponents who didn’t have a great deal of skill but compensated for what they lacked with lots of ambition and spirit. We eventually came to life with the equalising goal, then put on a much more stylish performance in extra time. And in that last period of the game the players that can be especially proud of how they performed were the infant trio of Junior Stan, Zavon Beans and Frankie Noodle – with a combined age of about eleven and a half.

Of course the real drama was being acted out on Green Street and Priory Road and later spilled on from the stands to the pitch. In typically sensationalist and superficial fashion, the media managed to conglomerate three very different episodes into one, and seriously distort what really took place.

The pitch invasions were nothing to do with violence. They were expressions of pure exuberance and relief – stupid but harmless. Lots of energetic youngsters were joined by middle aged geezers (and occasional geezeresses) with far too many pies in their tummies than is good for their hearts. Trying to sprint the length of the pitch, they were a danger only to themselves, no-one else. They were running for joy to hug their heroes and, yes, they enjoyed getting one over Millwall, just when Millwall thought they were going home with our cup scalp. I wasn’t one of the invaders – it would have been quite a leap down to the pitch from the Dr Marten’s Upper – but I truly shared their ecstasy. I don’t mean that I shared their…I can get my own…Oh, you know what I mean.

Earlier, in Priory Road, some Millwall fans who found themselves in the wrong place were chased by a small group of West Ham boneheads and one got stabbed. That terrible incident involving a handful of fans happened well away from the main fights involving many hundreds near the pubs in Green street.

As I was walking to the game I was pretty shocked to see far more “fans” heading in the opposite direction just to get involved in a fight they weren’t involved in but heard was happening down the road. And the look on their faces said it all, anxious, desperate, full of pent up venom. No doubt their counterparts form South London came with the similar emotions in their otherwise empty heads.

They weren’t the only ones without brains though. The incredibly stupid decision from on high to halve the number of tickets available for Millwall fans meant that many had no chance at all of getting a ticket, and were only going along for the battle outside. There has been lots of speculation on whether the fight was organised by both sides in advance. The question is irrelevant. It hardly had to be planned in advance.

I was very interested in Merion’s piece last OLAS locating the historical justification for the enmity in the events of the General strike of 1926. He explained how the shipyard workers/dockers on the Millwall side had scabbed on their comrades on the West Ham side. I’ve regurgitated this in my discussions with friends about the events that night. There we’ve been, discussing it at length, shaking our heads at the mindless violence, discussing levels of alienation and the desire for group identity and empowerment and such-like bollox, then coming back to the point that lots of alienated people who yearn for a sense of identity don’t need to walk along scraping their knuckles or chucking sticks and bottles. But then I’ve chirped up at the end with, “Mind you, there are of course very sound historical reasons why we hate Millwall…” and then reflected on the importance of memory, only to be brought up short by my friends commenting, “Yeah, Dave, but most of those who were fighting last week probably couldn’t remember what they were doing before their last pint , let alone what their great-granddads did in 1926,” which is a fair point.

But, at the end of the day, Millwall are still a bunch of scabbing bastards south of the river.

I see that the Evening Standard published some mug-shots the other day of those the police want to “interview” in connection with the events outside the ground. I’m full of sympathy for those who ran on the pitch. I’ve got no time for those who just wanted a ruck, though if they end up in court they might try what is coming to be known in legalistic parlance as the ‘Gerrard defence” which runs along the lines of “Yes I was there and I was hitting out but so were my friends, and my name is Steve Gerrard, and I’m a rich and famous footballer though I sound like a no-mark from Brookside Close, and it was all my mates’ fault and the fault of the guy I hit, who kept battering my fists with his face, is that all right, m’lord, our kid? Which way is the exit?”

Which brings us nicely to today when we entertain the likely lads of Liverpool. On paper it looks like men v boys (we’re the boys in case you are wondering) but we do usually raise our game against Liverpool, even if we don’t always pull off the result. And I’m clinging on to that to feel that we have a chance of taking a vital point from today. Although all this clinging on and pulling off is making me a bit tired.

I remember once hammering them 8-1. Sadly that was in a game of subbuteo about 30 years ago. But if we take all three points well, I’ll consider taking that leap on to the pitch from the Doc Marten’s Upper. So if you see a 51 year old somersaulting through the air as the whistle-blows, you’ll know who it is. If we lose and you still see a 51 year old Hammers fan somersaulting above you – take no notice at all as that’s definitely not me.