by
West Ham have reached that stage in a managerial death spiral where even the good days have a bleakness to them, an inevitable-delaying futility that still leaves a feeling of emptiness.
Such was the paucity of West Ham’s performance in a wildly unconvincing 1-0 win over Southampton that even the obvious improvement to their immediate position in the Premier League table becomes caveated. Tonight’s 14th spot feels more misleading than last night’s 19th.
The attention on Moyes was inevitable. Moments before Nayef Aguerd headed home the only goal of the game came a Sky Sports rarity: the live game yellow breaking news banner announcing Brendan Rodgers’ exit from Leicester.
With that news, Moyes’ presence as an absolute outlier in this uniquely fraught and widespread relegation battle was confirmed. Of the nine teams involved, seven have now changed their manager. The only other team not to take the plunge are Nottingham Forest who, it would be reasonable to suggest, came in to the season with slightly different ambitions and targets than West Ham and more reason to be satisfied with the manager’s effort in keeping an almost entirely new squad outside the bottom three. And even then, his job isn’t particularly safe.
Rodgers was the closest thing to Moyes in this scrap; a manager who had overachieved with his club in recent years but seen things go horribly, abysmally wrong this season. Except with Rodgers and Leicester, the slide had been longer and slower and there were greater hints at what lay ahead.
West Ham’s summer recruitment on the back of their sixth- and seventh-place finishes was not that of a club planning for a relegation scrap.
And really, there was precious little about this win over Southampton that suggests West Ham and Moyes have a bright future together. It was a grimly functional and unceasingly stressful exercise in point securing.
Moyes will argue, with plenty of justification, that at this stage the points are all that matters in the vast number of Crucial Six-Pointers (19 by our count, assuming/hoping this remains a nine-team fight until the very final day) stretching out across the last six weeks of the season. But he also pretty much has to argue that because he has nothing else. The football is grim, and makes almost heroically little use of players who can offer so much more. West Ham fans are permitted joy only on Europa Conference nights; the Premier League is a relentlessly grim clinging-on-by-the-fingertips survival mission.
And they’ll probably achieve it. They are – or should be – better than most of those around them. They have weaponry that nobody else in that relegation bunfight can match. They should be fine.
But then what? They can’t afford another season like this one. There surely is no long-term future under Moyes.
The Hammers created almost nothing here, and while the delivery and header for the goal were moments of high class as Southampton’s defence went missing at an inopportune moment, this was very much the exception.
Southampton weren’t much better, but there is also a more widespread acceptance that they are already screwed. Born of necessity it may have been, but the Saints were the team to create the bulk of what little was created after the 25th minute, most notably almost immediately after the goal when an unsighted Lukasz Fabianski got down superbly well to keep out Romain Perraud’s effort.
It’s a huge three points for West Ham, and no doubt that is the absolute most important thing about days like these. But while it lifts them to 14th, which is good, they remain just a solitary point above the bottom three, which is bad.
And while it’s points that win prizes, you do have to wonder if there are many other teams against whom this would have been enough.
They really are still in desperate trouble, and their run-in features four of the current top five plus Liverpool. And if there was one member of the top five they might want to meet over the coming weeks it would be the one they don’t face: Spurs, a team who so often bring out the best (or least worst) in West Ham.
Moyes has his three points and outlasts another manager, but even on this, his very best of days, you were left wondering how many more days he has here.
