1st February 2026 Daniel Luker (@danielluker_)
The main talk about yesterday’s Chelsea vs West Ham match will understandably be the Blues second half comeback, but his how good were the Hammers in the first?
West Ham have obviously shown a lot of improvement in recent weeks, you can see we have so much more fight now, but still, the quality still isn’t there from a lot of players.
Crysencio Summerville, Jarrod Bowen, Jean-Clair Todibo, Tomas Soucek and Mateus Fernandes have taken a step up, but I’m not sure the rest of the team really has.
I think this Chelsea game was similar to the Spurs match a couple of weeks ago. Both the Blues and the Lillywhites were nothing short of embarrassing in the first halves.
Yes we played well in both of them, we were better against Chelsea, the players were linking up well, they looked like a real football team.
The combinations down our left side between Bowen, AWB and Soucek/Fernandes was beautiful to see, Chelsea couldn’t cope.
Yes Jarrod’s goal was a little bit of a fluke, would it have gone in without Pablo’s attempt to tap it in, we don’t know. But you’ve got to be in them positions, having a striker in striker positions can make things like that happen.
There was nothing flukey about Summerville’s goal, an excellent pull back from AWB was beaten by an even better first time finish by Summerville.
But the truth is, Chelsea couldn’t cope with anything in that first 45 minutes, they were a complete mess, I don’t even think rock bottom Wolves have ever played as bad as that over a 45 minute period.
We were 2-0 up away at Stamford Bridge at the break and that was something to be proud of, but really, it should have been three of four, they were that bad. But it wasn’t, and that’s what cost us.
We all knew with it only being two nil, as soon as we conceded one and then parked the bus by bringing on Max Kilman, we all knew we wasn’t going to get all three points, and we didn’t, we didn’t even get one.
This article was supposed to focus on the first half, but you can’t not bring up that embarrassing second half. I can’t even fault the players effort, but our lack of quality and weak mentality really shined through in that second period at the Bridge
An embarrassing collapse in what is a desperate time for West Ham United.