KEN EARLY: A game fit only for footy anoraks
That’s particularly true on a bitterly cold day at Villa Park when the rain is drifting in under the roof of the Trinity Road stand, threatening to soak your equipment, and you haven’t worn enough layers because you keep forgetting how much colder it has been in England than in Ireland this winter.
Villa began the game quivering like nervous wrecks while West Ham shambled forward like zombies in search of nutritious brains. The match quickly degenerated into a flurry of Nathan Baker throws and free-kicks lumped towards the opposing box by Jussi Jaaskelainen.
Commentating on a match like this is not easy because there is no pattern to the play and soon you find there are not many nice things to say. You don’t want to be too critical, because you sense there is something unseemly about a journalist ridiculing Premier League players for failing to do difficult things that pros usually make look deceptively easy. Yet you don’t want to dishonestly give credit where none is due.
Still, this was a genuinely terrible first half. At one point the camera settled on Sam Allardyce as he watched the ball being booted from one penalty area to another, his head swivelling to follow the ball as it described a high looping arc through the rain. Our producer in Newstalk said this was an obvious gift-in-waiting: Sam Allardyce watching a Sam Allardyce team play Sam Allardyce football.
Half-time came and I wondered about Allardyce. He is a successful manager whose teams have never yet been found out over the course of a season, and he is a more sensitive person than is perhaps widely recognised. But I couldn’t help feeling a tinge of resentment at the blithe profligacy with which he treats the precious seconds of my sadly finite life.
There is a hidden social cost to the success of a manager like Allardyce, borne by the hundreds of thousands of fans who have watched attentively while his teams battered their way to mid-table respectability.
Think of the millions of man-hours that have been frittered away while West Ham pinball the ball at the opposing penalty area with limited success and ask yourself if this can really be good for society.
Allardyce knows there is something embarrassing about this type of football, otherwise he wouldn’t get so annoyed about being called a long-ball merchant (he prefers those long balls to be called long passes). He has developed a theory that English football managers are an oppressed group in their own country, condemned to bob against a glass ceiling while foreign owners give the best jobs to foreign managers. However, Allardyce’s failure to get one of English football’s biggest jobs might also have something to do with the fact that people like Roman Abramovich may not necessarily want to spend their time watching a team that reminds you of heavy industrial machinery.
In the second half, West Ham started to turn the screw and we saw what their method football can be like when it’s being executed more competently. By 55 minutes they looked much the stronger team. But it also seemed like they were more interested in winning corner kicks (they knew Villa have developed an irrational fear of corners) than scoring an actual goal.
West Ham have talented footballers like Mark Noble and Mohamed Diame but in the Allardyce system they must submit their individuality to their roles in the machine. There are so many rules in an Allardyce team, the most annoying of which is the requirement for every free kick to be launched high towards the opposing penalty area, that the ethos of the side begins to feel at best fussy and at worst downright fascistic. Subconsciously it was difficult not to start willing Villa to win, as their comparatively unstructured, amateurish-seeming efforts gradually cast them in the role of Humanity against the Machines.
Eventually Charles N’Zogbia, the most defiantly un-Machine footballer on the field, won a penalty from Noble (who was immediately substituted by Allardyce), which Benteke converted. N’Zogbia then curled an unstoppable free-kick into the top corner. West Ham scored a typically luckless own goal but Brad Guzan pulled out a couple of brilliant injury-time saves and they survived for a first win in nine matches.
Humanity had defeated the machines. Humanity’s manager, Paul Lambert, ran onto the field and engaged in some faintly comical public relations by ostentatiously directing each one of his players to go and applaud the fans on the Holte End.
The Machines’ Kevin Nolan sportingly congratulated Guzan for denying him the equaliser. The hellish discord and soul-sapping incompetence of the first half had resolved into a beautiful comedy. Football wastes so much of our time but the second half showed why we keep coming back for more.
