West Ham United have been struggling in the league, but their cup form has been excellent and they breezed past a Derby team who failed to catch light.
Arsenal are out. Liverpool are out. Chelsea are out. The 2022/23 FA Cup is starting to open up a little, and this raises the question of which other Premier League clubs might be able to exploit these relatively early eliminations.
Since the turn of the century, these three clubs alone have won the trophy 16 times out of 22.
Could West Ham United find a quite substantial silver lining in the second half of this season, following a first half that was unexpectedly weaker than expected? History would certainly seem to be on their side.
After all, they’ve long found success in the cup competitions when things haven’t been necessarily going so well in the league.
Their FA Cup wins in 1964 and 1975 came against the backdrop of 14th and 13th-placed finishes in the First Division respectively, while their 1980 win came from the Second Division.
And that history has repeated itself this season. While they’ve failed to get any momentum going at all in the league – their recent win against Everton was their first in the league since October 24 – the cups have been West Ham’s happy place. They’ve won eight out of eight in the Europa Conference League, winning their group by a somewhat jaw-dropping ten points, while their third-round win at Brentford was an early signifier of their recent upturn.
None of this meant that a trip to Pride Park to play Derby County in front of the glare of live television cameras wasn’t a potential accident waiting to happen.
Derby took a few weeks to adjust to life in League One, but they started to come together at about the same time as West Ham’s last-but-one Premier League win. A run of 14 games without defeat has lifted them to fourth place in the table, while they were only knocked out of the EFL Cup by Liverpool after a penalty shootout.
Shortly before kick-off came a blow to West Ham’s hopes of upsetting the applecart in the FA Cup this season, when the winners of this game were drawn away to Manchester United in the next round.
For much of the last ten years, such a draw would have left opponents rubbing their hands with glee at the prospect of taking on English football’s most enduring soap opera, but this season has brought about a sudden upturn in form that makes heading to Old Trafford a somewhat less appealing prospect than previously in…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Football365…