If you step back just for a moment and view the basket case my club, your club, our club has become, the overriding emotion is sadness - isn’t it - to see the mess that West Ham has become.
Sad with the constant unrest, sad with the alarming start to the season, sad with the level of performance with just one win in nine Premier League games and sad with the doom and gloom.
Sad that just two years after winning a European trophy, we’ve wasted the £105m Declan Rice transfer fee and spent something like £500m on new players and still look like we are £200m in debt.
Where did that European Conference League side go? Just five from the starting line-up in Prague are still with us. We have managed to criminally squander that platform to build on three seasons in European football. It’s sad to have got to the point of boycotts, sit-ins and marches against the owners.
And then you look at our board, our owners, those responsible for the situation we are in. You see people living in their own self-serving bubble, people who own the shares but do not for one second own us, our club, our history, our legacy. What made us.
Maybe all that sounds a little emotional from an old timer who first saw the team play in 1958. A bit pretentious, perhaps. I hope not. Our club is at war, the fans with the owners, those owners defiantly clinging to power for the sake of the share price, what they can make if they sell, what David Sullivan can salt away if he finally sells up.
Actually I don’t really have much of an issue with tourists who want to fly in from Hong Kong to see my team. I’m not that bothered with the newbie fans who are well enough off to pay the sky-high prices that Premier League tickets go for these days.
It’s the way of the world these days, there's no stopping it now. But we left something behind when we were ‘conned’ into leaving Upton Park to rent a soulless athletics stadium that was supposed to elevate us to Champions League status.
It’s the worst stadium in the Premier League. And I’m not sure if any of the money made from the sale of the Boleyn Ground found its way into the club’s coffers to fund that world class team in a world class stadium.
We left behind the soul of our club, that image that we represented the East End, where our families had lived for generations. Through the wars, through the Blitz ,through poverty, through the rebuilding and transformation that followed the end of the docks.
Those folk, my family, your family, had a football team in their name. Now our owners have tried to change our name and marooned us on an island of poisoned and derelict land. I doubt that many of our fans now have the slightest connection with that history or the legacy.
There always has to be progress. But what we have had to endure is a ’progress’ in search of money, with a deafening deaf ear to what made us what we were. Cold, cynical, destruction of a community. I keep being told that Sullivan is a good businessman, that he even knows how to pick a player in the market.
If that’s the case, why are we so much in debt? Why has he sanctioned and even influenced the signings of so many sub-standard players that have put us in the position we are in now?
Why have we had four managers in two years, a tainted and sacked technical director, the axing of a head of recruitment, three sets of coaching staff and a fire sale last summer to bring the wage bill down? Over 20 first team players gone and very little meaningful replacements.
We have been preparing for relegation for months and not seeing it. If Sullivan and his henchwoman Karren Brady were that good at their jobs, we would not be in this mess. You can’t blame the appointments and not take blame yourselves.
The board, ahh the board. An owner brought up as a Cardiff fan. A vice chair who supported Arsenal. A major shareholder from Prague. The daughter of David Gold who just wants to sell her 25 % holding and seems to be asking daft money for them.
If you don’t understand what this is all about now, you never will. I give up. But this is not the club anymore I was brought up on. I’m 76 now, and have had too much time recovering from a trip to hospital of late to think all this through.
Off the top of my head I can think of Everton, Manchester City, Sunderland, Arsenal and Spurs who have moved to new stadiums without trampling on the memories and heritage of their fans. Surely folk can see the difference?
We are the club from the ship yards, that first FA Cup Final at Wembley, promotion and then relegation in 1932 and 26 years before a return to the top flight. I bore you all with this because that 1932 season has had some mention of late as our current form mirrors that relegation season.
It was the first season my dad started watching the club as a 12 year-old. I didn't expect his stories from that era to surface again 93 years later.
And then there’s the 1960s. I happened across some amazing photos on the excellent West Ham United Nostalgia Page on Facebook of the triumphant homecoming when Bobby Moore and the 1965 team brought the European Cup Winners Cup back to the East End.
As a history lesson, it was amazing. The thousands outside East Ham Town Hall, everybody in their Sunday best. The trestle tables with sandwiches inside the town hall, the wives and children of the team, the pride and delight shone through. Alan Sealey and his wife showing the cup to the hordes of fans. That was a community, that’s what we’ve lost.
I shouldn’t wallow in all this nostalgia, someone will say we saw some of that when David Moyes and the team returned from Prague to Stratford, but it didn’t last long. Will those photos be shown some 58 years from now. I wonder. Where will our club be then?
So this week, as the war with the board continues, a sit on Sunday and a big march ahead of the Burnley game on 8 November still to come, we’ve had talk of share issues to raise money. That's something that should have happened months ago.
Limited lip service has been paid to the FAB/Hammers United and client journalists and the usual grifters are defending the board. Some cheap shots too, aimed at the HU organisers.
Of course we are told there is no money for the January transfer window and Lucas Paqueta’s future comes up again, while Nuno Espirito Santo doesn’t seem to be allowed the coaching staff he wants, while losing the fans already with some bizarre team selections.
By January it may be too late. We have ten tough games before then: Newcastle, Brighton twice, Burnley, Bournemouth, Liverpool, Manchester United, Manchester City, Aston Villa and Fulham. I can see about three wins there.
We’ve got four points, and will probably need around 38 to avoid relegation. That means 34 points now from 28 games. Best of luck with that.
Relegation will be a total disaster. Gone will be the TV money Sullivan relies so heavily on, the parachute money will be needed to pay off the loans we have, all revenues will drop and you can bet the stadium owners have already thought of shutting down parts of their London Stadium—probably the top tiers and even one of the ends to save money.
They won’t need to employ as many staff for a 25,000 crowd. There will be another fire sale of our players, and the value of those shares will drop alarmingly. Try getting £800m for the club then, Mr. Sullivan.
You can see I’ve had far too much time on my hands of late. Our only hope is that Nuno galvanises a dispirited squad into something that may fight for their lives. For us, for our legacy and heritage.
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