**New West Ham manager Nuno Espírito Santo lost us the game against Brentford, we would have given them more of a game under Graham Potter.**
When the official West Ham socials posted the official lineup an hour and a quarter ahead of kick off, West Ham fans well shell shocked. The decisions to include certain players in the starting XI was crazy.
Firstly, Nuno decided to play Lucas Paqueta up front, to do that when not only has he been away with Brazil over the past couple of weeks, but to start Lucas there already before giving natural strikers Callum Wilson and Callum Marshall a chance was silly.
I sort of got the decision to start Jean-Clair Todibo, Mavropanos was away, and while he’s been our best central defender this season, he hasn’t exactly been great. So, the fact JCT and Gilman were training together every day over the International break, Nuno may have thought they could strike up a partnership on the pitch, but that was far from the case.
Then for some reason, the 51-year-old decided to start Ollie Scarles and Kyle Walker-Peters as full-backs, not only should he have picked two of our best players in Wan-Bissaka and Diouf over them, he also played them on the wrong sides.
Yes, KWP can play on the left, but the decision to start Ollie Scarles at right-back on the night was incredibly strange and the experiment failed, he was hooked at half-time as we switched to a back five.
It somehow got even stranger, Nuno also decided to start Andy Irving from the start, he’s just not good enough for the Premier League, everyone knows that. But Nuno put him in from the start and he was out of his depth, him and Soucek in midfield was a recipe for disaster and that’s exactly what it made.
The starting XI wasn’t where the disasters ended for Nuno, he also got his substitutions completely wrong. The decision to bring on Diouf and AWB at half-time was right, but to bring on Mavropanos too, and no take off either Todibo and Kilman, therefore changing to a back 5 was silly.
We were losing and had to take control of the game if we wanted to get anything from it, not only that, we were already getting dominated in midfield, Jordan Henderson as running the game, so the decision to take Fernandes off and have one less midfielder was mind boggling.
Not only that, it took him till the hour mark to bring on a striker, and he brought the wrong one on. For some reason, Nuno doesn’t seem to want to play Wilson, who would have really suited this game. Instead bringing on Callum Marshall, who managed six touches in half hour and didn’t add the focal point we needed while Wilson was sat on the bench for the third game in a row under Nuno.
Hammers fans would have thought Nuno’s bad decisions were over for the night, but that wasn’t the case. Again, instead of getting Wilson, a proven Premier League goalscorer on the pitch. He decided to tale one of our only goal threats off in Tomas Soucek for Guido Rodriguez.
The collective sigh from the few fans that were left in the crowd when Guido cam eon in the 71st minute summed up yesterday evening for the Hammers, it was a complete disaster.
Obviously it’s still early days for Nuno at West Ham, but the fact he has two weeks on the training pitch with the players and they had that to show for it is really worrying for our survival hopes.
And the fact that I genuinely believe that if we had Potter in charge of that game we would have had more chance of winning makes me feel like relegation is almost a certainty, unless Nuno can sort this mess out.