Somehow Graham Potter has managed to overcomplicate the role at West Ham. Score more goals than your opponent and everything else looks after itself. But the failed recruitment of successive windows and the lack of replacement for an ageing [Michail Antonio](https://www.claretandhugh.info/antonio-returns-for-west-ham-u21s-but-kante-endures-nightmare-outing/) is nothing new: West Ham relied on him for two years past his sell-by date when the time to replace him was upon the side after the Conference League win, two years ago.
Potter’s utterance that ‘_he didn’t need a striker’_ in the summer window should have shown everyone exactly how muddled his thinking. Instead of which, we have had to watch our West Ham side take the pitch without a goalscorer in the side.
Talk about handing the initiative to an opponent. Lowest number of gaols last season – fewest wins at home since- I don’t know when. Graham Potter has somehow mixed up messages and now cannot, seemingly, fix a defence to whom the ball just keeps coming back.
Without a hold-up player on the pitch this was always inevitable. Awful enough to watch last season, Graham Potter had a summer window to go and buy an Idrissa Gueye, a Brian Brobbey or anyone of a dozen linked strikers who would have given West Ham the opportunity to move up the pitch and keep possession. But he opted for a goal keeper and a left back, and then 33 year old Callum Wilson rocked up on a free- which wasn’t even Potter’s choice.
Says it all really. Flawed.
Defensive-minded thinking is all very well if you create an iron-like back line. But he’s failed at that too. Time’s up.