Off we go to visit the ‘Appy ‘Ammers.
Hello, and welcome back. Go anywhere on your holidays? The weather forecast’s good for Saturday. Whether that’s anything to rely on we’ll have to wait and see. One thing you can rely on is that West Ham will spend the next nine months being fawned over by the tabloids, in both written and broadcast formats.
The fascination with this largely unsuccessful club is one of football’s great mysteries. They’ve never finished higher than fourth,they’ve won nothing worth winning for nearly half a century* and it’s only lately that they’ve stopped getting relegated every other year. Yet there they are, talked about like they’re important. It’s all very strange.
West Ham have got a fascination with villainy. There’s the Kray twins, the Cockney Rejects and they’re one of the two clubs whose hoolie-firm are treated as folk heroes by press and club officials alike. You know who the other one is, and what they’ve both got in common.
It’s not only their owners who are revolting, so are supporters after the usual hidden price rises that all Premier League clubs now regard as the norm. Villa is a Category A fixture, as it should be, so the cheapest general sale tickets are a stallion, or whatever the Cockney parlance for fifty quid might be, and at that price they’re cutting their own froats, guv.
They’ve got a new manager who was at Real Madrid then moved up in the world to Wolves before falling dramatically. They’ve still got Danny Ings because we still refuse to give them a refund and Emerson Palmieri, whose parents should have given him Lakeand as a middle name. Yes, we’ve said that one before but it’s still as good as ever. We’ve got a load of new players, a couple returning and to start as we mean to go on we’ll have some injuries.
It’s a 5.30 kick-off so we’ll know what we have to do to be top of the league. No problem.
* The one they did win wasn’t worth bothering with, which is why we didn’t.
