In May it will be 40 years since we won the FA Cup and this season I would like to see West Ham get to one of the cup finals.
League or FA Cup – I don’t mind – but a successful season for West Ham this campaign will be getting to Wembley.
Our squad is good enough but it’s not been good enough that we haven’t won anything in 40 years.
For a club like ours, these days are important to the fans and getting to a cup final would be a big thank you to them.
I hope we will be in a position to play our best side in every round of both competitions because I think we will be comfortable in the league.
Last season we managed to go through the entire campaign without too many worries about relegation.
Sure there were a couple of moments where you felt a few more bad results could see us dragged down there but then we’d get a couple of results and we were back on track again.
This should be the season where we don’t even have to think about relegation at all. Our aim should be to improve on where we finished in the league last season.
The manager has proven himself as a good manager and he goes about his business quietly and doesn’t slag people off.
He does things the right way and it’s almost like the West Ham managers we used to have at the club.
Last season we started slowly as all our new players got to know each other and also the way Pellegrini wanted to play.
When I was playing you didn’t have as many comings and goings during summer as we do now.
You’d go back at the start of the season and you’d have the same squad, the same group of lads – it just felt like you’d been away for a few weeks.
Everything was business as usual and it was just the case of getting yourself back up to match fitness.
For us this season, it can only be a benefit that so many of our squad have had a season together in the Premier League, know how the manager wants to play and that we are only looking to bed in a couple of new players. Familiarity breeds success without a shadow of a doubt.
By contrast, my first summer as a professional footballer at Walsall, we had three months off. I went to work on a building site with my cousin to give me something to do.
Back to today’s squad and I wasn’t surprised that Adrian left West Ham but I was surprised that he held on for us long as he did once it was clear he wouldn’t play.
I was quite surprised to see we had signed two goalkeepers and that David Martin – Alvin Martin’s boy – has come in as number three.
It was a bit of a strange one. I’ve seen him play on a few occasions and he always does OK but I never felt he was good enough to make it at the top level.
To me, he was always going to be a great goalkeeper for a Championship or League One side. He was at MK Dons for a long time before he joined Millwall but good luck to him at West Ham.
As for the other goalkeeper, Roberto, I don’t know a great deal about him but you’d have thought both have been brought in to battle it out to be back-up to Lukasz Fabianski.
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