Monday, September 15

Keen out!

WBA 3 West Ham 2

Good to see that Gianfranco Zola’s first job at the club was to find his mum’s old claret curtains from the attic and hastily get out the Singer sewing machine to patch over our XL logo. Still, I expect there’s a deal with Lehman coming up.

With rare rays of sunlight illuminating the metropolis, my Saturday afternoon involved a family trip to a previously undiscovered section of Hampstead Heath. We ambled past previously undiscovered ponds and woods towards Golders Green, before ending the afternoon with a pint of Autumn Gold in the Spaniards Inn. There was always the temptation to text someone for the score, but somehow I knew it might intrude horribly upon our bucolic ramblings.

But upon returning home and turning on Setanta Sports News, there it was. “Bastards! Stupid stupid Bastards!” I exclaimed in the manner of Michael Palin in Ripping Yarns. Somehow the West Ham diehard knows that a 3-2 defeat at WBA must have involved a late goal and an injury to Deano. While Bobby Zamora suddenly looks England class at Fulham.

The evidence on Match of the Day suggests a great game but three defensive blunders from the Irons, although it looked like Green played the ball first for the penalty. Upson lost Morrison for the first and Albion’s winner involved the Hammers defence leaving a space wider than Mike Ashley’s vacant seat. Our back four, minus Ferdinand and McCartney, parted with the alacrity of bankers in search of a redundancy cheque. At least Curbs knew how to close out a game.

We shouldn’t be losing to newly promoted sides, but on the positive side we came back to take the lead, scored from a corner again and Di Michele and Parker missed great chances. New left-back Ilunga was said to have had a sound debut too.

And so young Kevin Keen, aged 16, has played one, lost one. Now it’s over to Zola and Steve Clarke, who’s cost us another £1 million in compensation just to replace Mervyn Day. Hopefully Clarke was the backroom genius who made Mourinho look so good and at least he’s not Dennis Wise.

One final thought. If it wasn’t for the collapse of XL we might have been able to buy Newcastle as our feeder club.

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