By Louis Nixon
**Nuno Espírito Santo went from hero to zero last night after his first-half heroics translated into a defensive disaster.**
Unfortunately, in Football, sometimes you have to focus on the positives even whilst there might be an overwhelming amount of negatives and though yesterday was totally inexcusable and dismal, Nuno and the squad had to take the positives on board and go into the remaining games with our head held high.
Against Spurs, all Hammers fans said “that was the best first half we’ve seen all season”, and the phrase was once more repeated against Sunderland and then against Chelsea. For three weeks in a row, we’ve had an upwards trajectory and that’s a massive improvement. We’re putting ourselves into these excellent conditions, but we’re simply either not holding on, inviting pressure or making a comical change which causes the squad to descend into chaos.
West Ham has now lost 18 points from winning positions and whilst it sounds stupid, if we take West Ham’s first half performances and ended the game there, we would’ve been sat 10th in the Premier League, pushing for European Football! That’s how poor our margins have been.
Nuno’s side needs to learn how to keep the control and if they do somehow manage to do so, we will be totally golden.
It’s a glass-half-full or half-empty situation. What we saw in the first half was a European-level type performance, but the second half was Championship level.
If West Ham could keep these first-half performances going and maintain the scoreline or the performance for the second half too, suddenly, we won’t be speaking about relegation at all.
Whilst there are a lot of negatives that cannot be ignored and many other issues that need to be solved, in this case, we pick up the positives, take them to Burnley and see what happens there, in a crucial six-pointer.