Sitting-in for half an hour after the [Newcastle United](https://www.claretandhugh.info/west-ham-3-1-newcastle-united-player-ratings-as-nuno-claims-huge-victory/) game offered a stark contrast to the previous two home performances which had seen 20,000 fans boycott the Brentford game and thousands stream away early against Crystal Palace following painful losses: It was rare to see the ground almost full come the final whistle.
The fan protest – planned in Graham Potter’s era – seemed almost ungrateful after the teams’ performance but of course, it was aimed at the board not the team. A further protest is planned for next Saturday’s crucial ‘six pointer’ Burnley fixture.
No end in sight to fan protests at West Ham ‘United’.
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However it seems as though the supporters and board conflict could easily fester on and become a chronic condition: As the [observer.co.uk](https://observer.co.uk/news/sport/article/west-ham-premier-league-protest) puts it today:
_“**This isn’t a feud you look at and see easy exit routes.** With a 99-year lease signed in 2013 on the London Stadium, new owners would find it hard to extricate their new possession. And where would they go? The cost of building another new ground in this part of London would be astronomical, and potentially take decades._
_The disquiet therefore is of the circular, gnawing kind. The owners sit on their ‘investment,’ which exploited the impasse over the London 2012 stadium’s future use, and the team stays locked in survival mode while the fans experience a kind of existential dread”_
And so it goes on like some kind of never ending, football-themed Groundhog Day conflict between supporters, eyes fixed firmly in the rear view mirror and occasionally with rose – tinted glasses reminiscing of the ‘old days’, and a board that doesn’t really care about their fanbase experience or coming good on their promise of a world-class _anything_, merely running the club like it is still 1975.
Where will it end? _Providing the club doesn’t get relegated_, supporters are a notoriously fickle bunch and if Nuno guides the Hammers up the table four or five places, chances are enough of the supporters will ‘settle’ for that. Until the next time.