WHEN only one team can be champions every year tradition becomes important for football clubs. Tottenham haven’t won the league since 1961, Everton haven’t won it since 1987 and West Ham’s best finish is third in 1985-86, a season where, thanks to a TV blackout for the first half of the season, mystery still shrouds many of their performances.
In lieu of league titles, Tottenham say the game is about glory, which in many ways it is, although their two most recent trophies have come under the less than fondly remembered regimes of Juande Ramos and George Graham, echoing the fact that Chelsea’s two most recent European honours came under the loathed stewardships of Rafa Benitez and Maurizio Sarri. Sometimes coaches you don’t like win big matches for your club.
This weekend West Ham host Tottenham, the home side still with a reasonable shout of ending the 2020-21 season as London’s highest place side, although that looks under threat from an improving Chelsea, who dispensed with a manager who “got the club” and went with Thomas Tuchel, a man more focused on setting up teams to score goals and not let many in at the other end. But whatever Chelsea go on and do in the next three months, West Ham are having an unexpectedly strong campaign, and are doing so under the unlikely leadership of David Moyes, now in his second spell in charge. Has any manager endured a longer hangover than the one Moyes suffered after his ill-fated attempt to replace Alex Ferguson at Manchester United? From Real Sociedad to Sunderland to West Ham, it felt like clubs were appointing the concept of’ David Moyes at Everton more than the manager he was at that precise moment. Maybe the sheer size of the job at Old Trafford, and the need for the 20-time league champions to play in a certain way led to Moyes losing his magic touch. For a long time it seemed like it had departed for good.
Whatever the reason for Moyes’ interregnum of gloom, the oddity that is 2020-21 has seen him bounce back, and bounce back in precisely the style that made him such a coveted manager 10 years ago. West Ham are 15th for both average possession and pass completion this season yet no club outside Manchester has lost fewer games than them and they are just four points off second place. The club’s current points total of 42 is a number that will haunt West Ham fans, as it’s how many they collected in 2002-03, when they came 18th. It remains the highest points total by a relegated side in a 20-team Premier League campaign, and came from a squad that included the likes of Michael Carrick, Joe Cole, Jermain Defoe, David James and Paolo Di Canio. A group of players who could play The West Ham Way but significantly not in a way to retain their place in the top-flight, however unlucky they may have been.
The various fortunes of West Ham and David Moyes this century highlight the limits of a club marrying itself too closely to a self-perpetuating philosophy. Without sounding too much like a pundit who played the sport mostly in the 1980s, the philosophy I like is the philosophy of the three points (philosophy). And that’s one that Moyes has re-engaged with in 2020-21. As the table below shows, he already has two top six finishes in the Premier League with historically low possession numbers. No-one will surely ever challenge Leicester’s all-time outlier of a season, but the other four teams on this list are covered by just two managers, Moyes at Everton and Martin O’Neill at Aston Villa. Pragmatic men and lastingly popular at clubs whose fans are realistic enough to understand that often in football you do what works. Until it stops working.
All of which brings us round to Jose Mourinho, a manager who also fits into the pragmatic basket but who did so, at least at the start of his career, with considerable servings of panache too. His early Chelsea sides impressed defensively, but they also ended 2004-05 with 72 goals, only one fewer than Arsenal’s Invincibles 12 months earlier. But while the notion of people becoming more defensive and conservative as they get older is often incorrect, it has seemed to apply to Mourinho’s approach to football management. There were faint signs at the start of this season that he was willing to open up a bit more and let Tottenham attack at will, but it was the home game with West Ham that seemed to end this stance for good. Throwing away a 3-0 lead is something that would haunt any manager but to Mourinho it’s the depths of despair, worse even than a hockey score. It means his current relationship with most Tottenham supporters ranges from partially strained to very much so.
Famously the club didn’t win any trophies under Mauricio Pochettino but they did entertain almost continuously for four years. In 2016-17 Spurs became only the second team in English top-flight history to be the leading scorers and have the best defence yet not win the league. If the game is about glory, then there you go. In the philosophy clasico West Ham are probably that little bit closer to the acceptance of pragmatism and that’s why they, and David Moyes, are feeling so rehabilitated. Moyes has never beaten Mourinho in the Premier League but it’s never felt more likely that he could. On Sunday we will find out.
West Ham (13/8) Draw (12/5) Tottenham (7/4)
