Julen Lopetegui has nowhere to hide, no-one to blame. Not even the rash, dumb sending off of Edson Alvarez before half time. If the head coach comes out and blames ‘playing with ten men’ for our embarrassing defeat against Nottingham Forest, I have news for him. We’d still have lost with eleven men.
With his ‘system’, probably we’d have lost with twelve.
The weekly puzzling change of tactics and formation. Rushed changes at half time after West Ham go behind again and again. Here is a manager, head coach, call him what you like, who thinks the Premier League is easy. The expressions on the players faces and the lack of discipline on the pitch – three could have been red-carded today – say it all: Lopetegui has already lost the dressing room.
This group of players must feel humiliated after todays’ performance but – Alvarez notwithstanding, I wouldn’t blame the team : Jarrod Bowen, Crysencio Summerville, Lucas Paquetá, Mohammed Kudus, Aaron Wan-Bissaka, Jean Clair Todibo and Max Kilman have the attributes to be the ‘spine’ of a very successful team.
Week by week they are having their ability coached out of them by a kind of football Don Quijote, running the players around in different styles and random formations in a chaotic search for some peculiar mythical footballing windmill but just discovering week by week that there is no room in the Premier League for such rash experimental eccentricity.
He claimed to have been studying West Ham for months when he was interviewed by the board. Maybe his tactics worked on Playstation FIFA 24 but in the real world he has been found out.
Maybe Lopetegui’s strategy will work on a Playstation
Other teams are too good to allow Lopetegui to ‘experiment’ four months into the role. Said experiments illustrated this week by having Antonio pop up at right back, Todibo suddenly appear playing as an inside-right and Summerville today – in his first start – stationed in some kind of midfielder no-mans land.
It’s brainless. And it’s failing. and it isn’t going to get better. This is it.
Time for him and others at the club to consider right now, today- not at Christmas- does he really have what it takes to coach this Premier League club?
