Nuno Espirito Santo spoke this week of the need for him and his West Ham players to both find a performance that works and then sustain it for an entire game.
Against Newcastle, they found it. There is no other way of saying this, which means it sounds like damning with faint praise but shouldn’t: this was comfortably West Ham’s best performance of the season.
More than that, it was better than anything the teams the Hammers find themselves competing with this season are capable of producing. This was your classic ‘They’ll be fine’ performance from a team with no business in a relegation battle but in one nevertheless.
The key now, obviously, is repeating it. But there was just so much to like about what West Ham did. And what they did amounted to – clever trick this, really, and one more struggling teams should adopt – was doing the exact opposite of pretty much everything they’d been doing this season up until now.
Coming into this weekend, one in five of all Premier League goals conceded from corners this season had been conceded by the Hammers. A genuinely absurd statistic, but here their defending at set-pieces was determined, organised and resolute, and matched by their efforts in open play.
But impressive as the defensive side of West Ham’s play was, the real eye-catching elements came further forward.
Few are the teams who emerge so palpably on top from a midfield tussle against Joelinton, Bruno Guimaraes and Sandro Tonali as West Ham did here. Fewer still the teams who do so while fielding a 22-year-old making his first Premier League appearance. He was outstanding in the face of what is just about the most fiery baptism a young Premier League midfielder could ever encounter.
Lucas Paqueta was magnificent alongside him, providing with Jarrod Bowen the link between midfield and attack that kept West Ham a constant threat.
Even after falling behind to a lethal Newcastle counter-attack inside five minutes and just 25 seconds after Jarrod Bowen had thundered a shot off the post, West Ham never faltered.
The mental fortitude to come back from such an early blow given just how rotten things have been for the Hammers this season is perhaps the most impressive thing of all about a performance that gives their entire season a different complexion.
When Jacob Murphy all too easily shifted on to his right foot to fire Newcastle ahead, thoughts turned inevitably to the Sack Race. Nuno and West Ham both looked like they might end today searching for their third appointments of the season on the first weekend of November, and that’s just plain nutty.
To turn it around from that position against a team of Newcastle’s toughness is mighty impressive.
West Ham thought they had a penalty minutes later, only to be denied by one of those VAR interventions that reminds us how bad it can be even when it works. The on-field decision was understandable, but after one replay clearly wrong. That was all that was needed to reveal Malick Thiaw getting a stud to the ball before making any contact with Bowen. A 30-second decision instead took four minutes longer than that for absolutely no discernible reason.
The Hammers were not to be denied, though, and had turned the game on its head by the break. Nick Pope will feel he might have done better with Paqueta’s long-range effort, although it was fiendishly well struck and dipped alarmingly late on the Newcastle keeper. He was powerless to do anything as Sven Botman diverted Aaron Wan-Bissaka’s low cross into his own net deep into injury time.
The good news just kept on coming, though, for a club where it has been in vanishingly short supply. West Ham controlled the second half in expert fashion, the final scoreline reflecting the balance of play only after Tomas Soucek bundled in a third goal in the very final seconds to confirm a deserved victory.
It is only West Ham’s second win of the season, and so much more materially beneficial than their other – funnily enough against Nuno’s Forest during the final days of Graham Potter’s ill-starred reign. Three late goals gave an air of freakish absurdity to that victory. There was nothing about it that screamed sustainability or repeatability.
This performance did. This is what West Ham should look like, and should be capable of. There was nothing outlandish or freakish about it other than its stark contrast to everything we’ve seen from them up until now.
It is a performance that not only buys Nuno time, but also provides proof of concept. This performance offers a roadmap to survival, and its future success need not always be against teams of Newcastle’s level either.
There are still going to be times when Nuno’s inherent conservatism costs West Ham. Had Newcastle been able to muster anything at all in response in the last half-hour here then questions would have been asked of Nuno’s decision to go so early to Soucek as a false nine when the Hammers appeared to be managing the game so well without going quite so negative quite so early.
But Newcastle did not and could not offer anything. There was perhaps some weariness after their Carabao exertions against Tottenham in midweek, but that offers only the most minor of mitigation for a club that has put itself into a position where challenging in multiple competitions is the norm. You can’t be this leggy and this far off it every weekend after a midweek game. Especially as Spurs barely showed up in midweek anyway.
Newcastle have been frustratingly and curiously unable to get anything going this season, today’s defeat meaning they are still yet to have the same result in two consecutive Premier League games this season, with losses now nudging ahead of wins and draws in the overall ledger.
The unconvincing nature of everyone apart from Arsenal means Newcastle’s stuttering start is far from terminal; even after this major setback they are still as close to the top four as the bottom three.
But they must now lift themselves for a big Champions League chance in midweek, while also coming up with far better ways to conserve some energy for the weekend to follow. This was a huge chance missed after the start they got.