Sacking the board

It's been a shoddy week with Masuaku's ban for spitting, Henry's sacking for racist generalisations, some botched signings on deadline day and a defeat at Brighton all combining to cause massive unrest among the away fans, who these days are the real hardcore fans with 21 plus priority points.

Well, firstly it's very unlikely that the board (ie Sullivan and Gold) will resign in the short-term. They get more publicity from West Ham than anything else and appear to be in it for the long haul. I've interviewed David Gold and his feeling for the club seems genuine, whatever mistakes have been made. Though to give them some credit, the choice of Moyes has been vindicated so far, as he's made a difference. They can't live off saving the club forever, even though they did undoubtedly do so when the Icelandic owners went bankrupt. But the other risk is that there's no guarantee we won't get worse owners and as someone commented on these pages, the fit and proper persons test is no protection.

What might be achievable in the short term though are several changes. Firstly installing a professional director of football and removing David Sullivan from transfer dealings. Whatever Sullivan is doing isn't working. We need a new head of recruitment anyway and he should work with the manager to sign players who would be recruited by the new director of football. And we don't need any signings from the chairman.

There should also be a thorough review of attitudes to race within the club as Tony Henry might have been reflecting attitudes from elsewhere. If he had such glib attitudes to 'African" players how did he get through the recruitment process and are others thinking in this way? 

There should also be a club policy of not undermining managers and not discussing current players like Robert Snodgrass in the media. Karren Brady should be told to drop her column in the Sun as it cost us the Slimani loan and offended Snodgrass. While the Sullivan boys should be told to never discuss transfer deals on twitter until they are done.

We also need to know more about moves to make the stadium more like home. For example, what happened to Slaven Bilic's proposal of having a claret carpet around the pitch? If the landlords won't go with this then I'd be happy with navy blue, particularly if we had it as our third kit.

The other thing that would help restore some trust would be an honest assessment of how much extra income the stadium generates and how much is meant to go on transfers. And finally, not mentioning unrealistic names like Bacca, Lacazette, Batshuayi and Carvallho unless the deal is done.

Sullivan and Gold would still be in control, but all these moves might give us a bit of claret and blue glasnost.