Are we finally, Team Moyes?
Are we finally Team Moyes?
In an inconsistent season we have flirted with the relegation places before finding just enough form to lift ourselves to safety with a handful of matches left to play. It’s been pretty poor in the Premier League after two top-seven finishes, with lower mid-table the best this season can offer.
But consolations can come from surprising places, and West Ham’s disappointing Premier League season could yet come with a silver lining. Whisper it, but West Ham United could yet end this season with their first piece of major silverware in 43 years, since the 1980 FA Cup!
The Irons are not alone in going into this match seeking to end a trophy drought. It’s the same for our manager. David Moyes has been in management now for a quarter of a century, and although he has earned a reputation as a decent manager, his time has hardly been festooned with silverware.
One Football League Second Division – that’s League One, in new money – title in 2000 with Preston North End, a Community Shield in his very first match as the successor to Sir Alex Ferguson at Manchester United and… that’s it. He hasn’t even won the Premier League’s Manager of the Month thingy since March 2013.
It could be tempting to segue from this sort of record into something dismissive about his “‘failure” which regular CandH followers are more than aware of our views on this, but the truth is that such is the polarisation of the game in this country in the 21st century that winning much silverware is practically impossible unless you’re involved with one of the big 4 .
Moyes had the opportunity to manage one of those for just less than a year, but Manchester United were a club beginning a period of transition which never seems to have ended. The season he had at Old Trafford didn’t work out, but would any manager have fared better after the loss of such an influential figure as Ferguson?
The likelihood of winning major trophies at his other clubs was always slight, because that’s the way it is for the overwhelming majority of managers. In 11 years at Everton he managed one appearance in the FA Cup final.
At West Ham, he still hasn’t even quite got that far, with his team falling in the semi-finals of the Europa League to Eintracht Frankfurt being as close as he’s got. But should we be that surprised? After all, West Ham United haven’t won a major trophy in 43 years. Everton haven’t in 28.
But all that is going to change on June 7th as we finally get our hands on a major trophy !
