Newcastle are good and don’t really need a lot of help to beat West Ham, but West Ham generously gave it to them anyway.
“I’m really pleased about the result. We did what we had to do. We have played better than that and not won this season, but today was all about the result.
“Look, I’m in a results business, I have to get results.”
The words there of David Moyes. Not tonight, obviously. But on Sunday, arguing as he had to that the ends of a 1-0 win over Southampton justified the grimly dull and uninspired means.
The problem for Moyes with that was that watching that performance it was impossible to imagine it being too long before another result came along that would bring his own words cascading down around him.
Admittedly, not even we thought it would be quite as bad as this truly horiffic night against a very good but not unstoppable Newcastle side. The general standard of defending in the Premier League this season has been poor, which makes it all the more remarkable that the Hammers managed to produce a performance whose ineptitude still really stands out. The first four goals are just a horrible collection of carelessness, incompetence, slapstick and above all else terrible, terrible timing.
We’re just going to run through them all, because we need to process it ourselves as much as anything.
West Ham actually started this game really rather well. For five whole minutes. For five intoxicating, beguiling and entirely deceptive minutes they were everything they hadn’t been in that stressful pressure-cooker of the weekend’s six-pointer. They ran at Newcastle, they got the slower members of that backline troubled. They nearly took the lead through an own goal. They dominated possession and territory. They identified a pace mismatch between Jarrod Bowen and Dan Burn, one they would spend the rest of the game inexplicably failing to capitalise on. Then they just gave away a dismal goal.
First Thilo Kehrer needlessly concedes a corner. Then that corner is half-cleared. Allan Saint-Maximin picks it up, twists a defender’s blood for a laugh and then clips in a cross where – and this is all happening moments after a corner in a packed penalty area, remember – Newcastle’s No. 9 is stood entirely unmarked to head home.
And it got worse minutes later when a crooked and flat-footed West Ham defence were caught out by the simplest of balls from defence and a Joelinton run so basic that even he assumed that the freedom he’d been…
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