Jamie Carragher believes “shocking” West Ham are one of the slowest teams ever in the Premier League and risk relegation, while former Bournemouth and Wolves boss Gary O’Neil said they looked “lost”.
West Ham’s relegation worries deepened with their fifth straight defeat at home as Brentford earned a deserved 2-0 win at Monday night football.
Nuno Espirito Santo is winless in his first three games, with his new team in second place in the Premier League and Sky Sports’ Carragher believes the club’s poor performance is partly down to their “throwback” approach to transfers.
“Shocking and it’s been shocking for a while,” Carragher said of West Ham’s performance against Brentford. “It feels an awful long time ago that they won the European trophy under David Moyes.
“Sometimes we question supporters when they go against the club or they go against an ownership. A lot of the time it’s almost a last resort and very rarely do supporters of their own football clubs get it wrong, they know exactly what’s going on in this football club and it’s not up to the managers.
“The ownership at West Ham now is completely different to what we see at the club which has just absolutely knocked them in their own patch. It’s almost like a backlash in terms of how they go about transfers. It just doesn’t feel like a modern way of doing things and I think that’s where the frustration comes from.
“They are looking at other clubs who are not a patch on West Ham and that is no disrespect to Brentford and maybe a Brighton who we see as up-and-coming, modern clubs.
“West Ham are a far bigger club than those two clubs, but the way they are run at the moment means they can actually compete with them on the pitch.”
West Ham’s home form this season
Carragher highlighted West Ham’s lack of pace and energy as a major concern.
“I can’t think of a less athletic team I’ve seen in a very, very long time in the Premier League,” he said. “It’s one of the slowest teams I’ve seen in Premier League football.
“The first goal feels like a throwback to 40-50 years ago. It felt like everyone had all the time in the world and there was space. It was absolutely horrible from a West Ham point of view.
“I feared for them at the start of the season because I felt the promotion would be more competitive. West Ham, with that squad, whoever the manager is, was always going to have a problem because I don’t think they can handle that physically.
“It wasn’t just a fantastic performance of football from Brentford, they absolutely bullied them. West Ham had to go to three at the back. They get beaten at home and you bring in defenders because you can’t cope with Brentford. You don’t play Man City, you don’t play Arsenal, it was Brentford and they couldn’t cope.”
‘Nuno has a hell of a job to do’
O’Neil is concerned whether West Ham, second from bottom with four points, can stay in the Premier League. There is currently a three-point gap to Burnley in 17th place, with only winless Wolves sitting below the Hammers.
“I was confident that West Ham would be okay throughout the season. Having seen that, I have real concerns about them now,” he said.
“They look lost from a tactical perspective, obviously Nuno has only been there for five minutes and he needs time, but they look lost, they look shot with confidence, they don’t look together.
“I think Brentford will finish somewhere in the six or seven towards the bottom of the league and they simply tore West Ham apart tonight at home.
“It’s going to take a seismic shift in that performance. Nuno has a hell of a job to get the team competitive in time to go to Elland Road in four days because it’s an unforgiving stadium. They’ll need a big improvement there to have a chance.”
Nuno: We have a problem at home
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Nuno Espirito Santo says his team can feel the fans’ concerns and they need to pull the fans together.
Nuno emphasized how the atmosphere at the London Stadium is not helping his side
“I think we’re all worried. You can feel it from our own fans. You can tell they’re worried. And then that concern turns into silence. That silence turns into anxiety. And we have a problem.
“It is understandable. Since I arrived, clear awareness that it is up to us to change this. Our fans need to see something they like, something that pleases them, so they can support us and give us energy – as we feel it at the beginning of the match.
“Our fans got behind the team because the team played well. Then the momentum changed, that’s what we have.
“We try to ignore it. We try to make them feel that they [the players] must be comfortable so they can express themselves well, but we cannot hide. It’s there to see.
“It’s there to see the situations we have, passes that don’t click, it has to do with many aspects and mentally it’s one of the aspects we have to change.”
Analysis: West Ham are relegation fodder
Sky Sports Lewis Jones at the London Stadium:
Losing 5-1 to Chelsea was bad. But this was worse.
West Ham expected their worrying start to the season to be remedied by a change of manager. Yet this is a problem that runs deeper than the one that leads them from the grave.
Years of lazy and poor recruitment decisions are going to bite this football club hard now. The fans are tired of it all. The squad of players we see are not built for the rigors of Premier League football.
Once again this West Ham team was bullied in the duels and lacked the ability to compete in key areas of the field. At one point, Tomas Soucek played in central midfield on his own after a tactical reshuffle, and the results weren’t pretty.
With the newly promoted teams swinging hard and picking up points with consistency, poor Premier League sides will be punished this season with the real threat of relegation. That is what West Ham face. They are very much in the scrap.