Tommy Martin: Rebirth of David Moyes a rebuke to modern chin-stroking toxicity 

This is a club owned by superannuated pornographers and whose fans are hardly renowned for their cuddliness - but West Ham are the feelgood story of the season

West Ham boss David Moyes, who has always seemed to stand for good sense, stability and structure. His success is a welcome change in the toxic world of football. Picture: Ian Kington 

When you think about it, David Moyes’s West Ham United are an unlikely candidate for the feelgood story of the season so far. I mean, we’re not talking about John Candy and the cast of Cool Runnings here.

This is a club owned by two superannuated pornographers who play in a soulless bowl of a stadium that they got off the taxpayer for a steal and whose fans are hardly renowned for their cuddliness.

Yet watching them soar to fourth in the Premier League and attempt to reach the last 16 of the Europa League against Genk this evening, in what will be Moyes’s 1000th game in football management, it’s hard not to get those Jamaican bobsleigh feels.

Much of this is to do with the manager, of course: all hail David Moyes, Banterslayer.

The man who kickstarted ‘Manchester United – The Comedy Years’ had become one of the game’s bit-part joke figures. Moyesie. Big Sam. Brucey. Even Roy Hodgson, who served out his managerial dotage with four accomplished seasons keeping Crystal Palace safe, never escaped his Euro 2016 meme hell.

If modern football was a high concept, white-knuckle spy thriller starring chiselled leading men, then these guys were the flubby light relief. With their pallid complexions and analogue tactics, they were there to make the slick, charismatic gurus at the top clubs look better.

Moyes joined the ranks of these unfortunate – though admittedly well-remunerated – souls after his failures at United, Real Sociedad and Sunderland. Targets for online piss-takers and sophisticated broadsheet chin-strokers alike, they were portrayed as ox-drawn ploughshares in the white heat of football’s analytical revolution.

Unless you dealt in Germanic high-pressing, symphonic Iberian passing or were a mad-eyed Brendan Rodgers-style tactical Dr Strange, you were stealing a living. How do these guys keep getting work, the cry went up, as they somehow amassed careers spanning decades and hundreds of games in an industry famed for its ruthlessness?

For the crime of not-being-Guardiola, any respect due to time-served journeymen was replaced by open derision. This tone of discourse culminated in the abuse dished out to Steve Bruce from Newcastle United fans, which, he claimed, included him being called “useless, a fat waste of space, a stupid, tactically inept cabbage head.” Try singing that to the tune of Seven Nation Army.

Even if there is no turning back the tide of toxicity which now engulfs public life, the renaissance of Moyes has at least given pause for thought about a lot of this stuff. It might even make us think about how we value people beyond the blood sport of football management.

For a start, time now casts a different colour on Moyes’s experiences at Old Trafford and on Wearside. Both clubs seem engaged in a perpetual cycle of dysfunction. Through executive mismanagement and general nuttiness, a succession of coaches has emerged bedraggled from their troubled midsts.

Moyes, on the other hand, has always seemed to stand for good sense, stability and structure.

From the accounts of those who have worked with him, he is fundamentally decent, extremely hard-working and a meticulous planner. Straight-talking to the point of dourness, his aversion to messianic bluster came to be seen as a flaw. When he told the Sunderland public they were in a relegation fight it was suggested he was dragging down the club’s morale, though his only crime was stating the bleeding obvious.

Anyone who watched Never Give In, the recent documentary about his remarkable life, will know the premium Alex Ferguson places on his proletarian, Glaswegian background. Hard work, the importance of the collective, not suffering fools – these were the shared characteristics Ferguson saw in Moyes when anointing him as his United successor (undervaluing the role of his own raging bastardry). As Moyes’ career went into a tailspin, it was possible to wonder whether these values had a place any longer within the cavalcade of spivs that populated the modern game.

But while Moyes has presumably evolved since taking over at Preston way back in January 1998, West Ham’s current success feels reassuringly old-school. This team, with its hard graft, fitness, physical strength, threat from set-pieces and collective spirit is not too dissimilar to the one he created at Everton. Its 4-2-3-1 formation is 4-4-2 with sideburns. Each component part is bolted on tightly. It has been assembled with canny purchases and a reluctance to splurge unwisely. When Moyes could find no value in the striker market to back up Michail Antonio, he kept his hands in his pockets, every inch the parsimonious Scot.

How West Ham are benefitting from this absence of nonsense. Prior to his arrival for a second time, they were a club floating in space. Literally: their fans shouted their anger about the move to the cavernous Olympic Stadium but one could barely hear them across the running track. With the stands brought in and the seats painted claret and blue, the stadium is now a little more hospitable, but it is Moyes’s team that has made West Ham feel like a proper football club again.

None of this is to say managers do not have limitations or a natural shelf-life. It’s clear that with football coaches there is often a Peter Principle at play, the old business theory that competent people get promoted in their job to a level in which their particular skills are no longer required, at which point they begin to appear incompetent. See Moyes at United, Hodgson at Liverpool.

But success in management is often also merely down to right-place-right-time kismet, so failure should not necessarily make you the subject of jeering derision. It’s great Moyes will celebrate his 1000th game in a friendlier atmosphere than that which Bruce endured in his final game at Newcastle. It is nice to see a decent man doing well. But at a time when the light-speed advance of technology puts a premium on youthful vigour over white-haired experience, Moyes’s managerial rebirth is reassuring for all of us who hope the passing of time won’t see us consigned to the ranks of the cabbage heads.