by Ian Herring »
12 Dec 2011 01:00
These East London types never fail to 'deliver' when they get turned over at Reading. Going off on one big-style. Lovely.
Even when they had that no-necked homunculus Bellamy scampering down the wing when they beat us pretty comprehensively when we were in the Hairband League, you had the sense that always seems to hang around their club like an old smell that they are mutton...dressed as Spam.
To see Allardyce there as a manager is funny enough. It dispels the 'myth' of West Ham - a load of media blather - as some kind of silken-skill heartland of Association Football. (Not that people like Julian Dicks and some of the dross they've had there over the years didn't already. Anton Ferdinand, anyone, in the 6-0 narrow home win?). Ahhh! The poor old hacks of Fleet Street (or wherever it is they tap out their mangled rhetoric these days), seeing their little London luvvies getting gang-raped at provincial grounds every so often in a while. They looked like hoofers and humpers on Saturday, a wooden, lumpen side of no-hopers who had the cutting edge of a spoon. At times it was like watching an inarticulate child struggle with his English homework while his father watched in disapproval. We are no great shakes, but against the Tubby Isaacs lX we ended up looking sharp and clean in the latter stages of a gloomy December afternoon in front of a bilious crowd and a mackerel sky, so all one can do really is thank the visitors for their willingness to implode in such unstylish fashion.
Nice to see some reasonable comments from some of them re: Kebe's little bit of banter, but to be fair, he was skinning them like Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall on a rabbit shoot. It's nearly the f*cking panto season and so a bit of sock-based humour was good enough for this time of year.
Just before the sendings off I was just thinking that the game would be decided by some on-pitch violence. Up until then it had been pretty drab.
How pleasant to have been proved correct.
So here's to the claustrophobic shit-hole that is the East End. It brings us, periodically, games where we are able to exercise appropriate humiliation on visitors who (in the main) believe their own hype and don't seem to like it when it is ritually abused.
That, and pie and mash and liquor, which is far more palatable than watching West Ham United.
Cheers lads. Great to have you in town again. Probably have to pull your socks up in training this week when old Pie Face gets into work.
Socks Up Mother Brown!
Socks up Mother Brown!
(Etc.)