**Nuno Espirito needs to change his central defensive pairing vs Newcastle because Kilman and Todibo are just not good enough.**
In the last two matches new West Ham boss Nuno Espírito Santo has come in for a lot of criticism for his crazy team selections. Playing Scarles at RB, Soucek and Irving as a central midfield pairing and Lucas Paqueta up front.
But while we want Nuno to stop his crazy antics and pick our best players and play them in the right positions, the former Nottingham Forest manager does need to go a bit mad in the centre of defence.
Jean-Clair Todibo and Maximilian Kilman simply cannot play in central defence tomorrow, they have been absolutely atrocious recently, in fact they have both had horrific West Ham careers in general
Ideally Konstantinos Mavropanos would come in for Todibo and remain with Kilman, however with the news he’s out for 4-6 weeks, we really are in a central defensive crisis.
Seeing as they can’t play together and they are our only real options we need to put square pegs in round holes.
To be fair, calling Igor, a centre-back by trade a square peg in a round hole is hard, because we haven’t seen him in a West Ham shirt. But from what we’ve seen for him at Brighton and against us in the Conference League final, he isn’t the best. But to be honest, if he can head a ball, he’s probably going to be a better LCB than Kilman.
Igor simply has to start, but the problem is, he can’t play on the right, and we simply HAVE to drop Todibo because he just isn’t good enough. So hopefully Nuno starts Igor on the left and throws a curveball and starts Soungoutou Magassa next to him on the right.
In his breakout season in 23/24 for Monaco, Soungoutou Magassa played mainly as a central defender, of his fifteen starts he played fourteen of them in the heart of defence. Obviously it would be a risk, but to be honest I don’t think he could possibly be worse than Todibo.
Hopefully Nuno has this idea in mind and has been working on the training ground in the eight days between the Leeds game and Newcastle on Sunday. Or if not, and he decided to go for Kilman and Todibo I really hope he’s done some real work with them on the training pitch.