Tuesday, October 20

Was this the strongest bench in WHU's history?

One notable feature of the win at Crystal Palace was the amount of talent on the West Ham bench. WHU's substitutes were Andy Carroll, Nikica Jelavic, Mauro Zarate, Enner Valencia, Pedro Obiang, Angelo Ogbonna and Darren Randolph. That's some £50million worth of talent, while £7 million Michail Antonio couldn't even make the bench. The fact Bilic used Carroll, Jelavic and Zarate to offer something different up front certainly helped end the resistance of Palace's ten men after the starting eleven ran out of ideas. It was only a few weeks ago that we had six kids on the bench at Anfield in Oxford, Lee, Cullen, Samuelson, Knoyle and Spiegel, who were being babysat by Matt Jarvis. The seven who made it to the bench at Palace are surely the strongest set of subs in West Ham's history.

3 comments:

matt said...

And that was without Alex Song and Winston Reid. Add Spiegel in goal, and we could field a reserve 11 that would arguably be stronger than the first team of a few years ago

matt said...

Sorry, I meant add Reece Oxford and Joey O'Brien

Pete May said...

Good point. We now have two decent players for every position and a good crop of kids to back them up...