It’s the Christmas season and everybody’s got shopping lists as long as Julen Lopetegui’s face. Come 25 December, there should be smiles on most faces, yet there’s always more to be gained in the Boxing Day sales.
And in football terms, things are just starting to warm up at this time of year as advent quickly gives way to the transfer window. So, what’s on this year’s West Ham wish list? Well, a bit like my own repetitive requests for reading material, vinyl and whisky – surely the staple festive diet of any happy Hammer, plus pigs in blankets and a win or two – West Ham’s wants seem to be pretty unchanging.
Yet again, a shiny new striker tops many people’s requirements. Haller and Scamacca had to be returned, leaving Antonio the equivalent of the ragged but comfy-fitting jumper that consistently gets pulled out at the expense of more fashionable attire. Füllkrug is the present that got bought when inebriated on the way home from the office party and then mysteriously mislaid.
So a functioning Antonio replacement remains very much the in-demand purchase for the third or fourth year running but, like the Action Man figure in Jingle All The Way, such things are fiercely fought over. Anyway, we could buy the most high-end centre-forward going and odds are it would get broken on the first outing or come without operating instructions.
Tactically, our managers remind me of my Dad – never one for reading instructions – trying to make sense of the strategy board game Risk, which he’d only got on the recommendation of a friend, so not dissimilar to our scouting department.
Many want another new manager and that wish might already have been granted. I’m writing this after the screwball Arsenal and the Leicester matches, the latter marking the bow of Ruud van Nistelrooy, whom I despised as a player but looks the part in the dugout.
I’m not sure Leicester will be the right fit, whereas a slightly more stable West Ham could have been, but we all know Sullivan prefers to go for tried and tested rather than something relatively new on the market, as long as it remains within budget.
Perhaps he should have checked the best-before date on Lopetegui. The pretence from some that the Spaniard was an obvious dud from the outset is unnecessarily disrespectful; after all, it’s well within the last decade that he was managing Spain and Real Madrid and winning the Europa League with Sevilla – only West Ham could take such a candidate and turn him into Mike Bassett.
But even fellow Spaniard Pep Guardiola is fallible, so I hope it proves the case that form is temporary and class is permanent. Either way, the December fixture list looks decidedly make or break. And if things are going haywire then we tend to pin the blame on the big man himself rather than the elves.
Ironically, Sully could potentially pass as either. He also resembles the conceited husband who teases luxury jewellery before delivering an ironing board. Even with a bank balance to die for, the chairman’s track record of ‘gifts’ to managers and fans suggests that taste is somewhat lacking.
He’s not the best person to be in control of the purse strings when there are the hopes and dreams of children – not to mention a bounty of adults who really should be old enough to know better – riding on it. I don’t really need any more books, records or bottles.
Personally, all I want for Christmas is a prolific striker, an astute manager and a classy, philanthropic owner. It’s just a shame I stopped believing in Santa around about the time of the Bond Scheme.
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