West Ham’s survival plan: from claret to plonk

IT MAY be unthinkable for the purists among West Ham’s fans, and Gianfranco Zola has not been able to admit it before, but the Hammers have hit on a survival plan – cut out the fancy stuff.

It does not take a rocket scientist to work out that when you are in a relegation scrap, you need to roll up your sleeves, get stuck in and make yourselves hard to beat, not try to persevere with a passing game, especially when you do not have the players for it.

Zola comes from the school of beautiful – even sexy – football under Ruud Gullit at Chelsea, and his installation as manager at the West Ham ‘academy’ of football should have led to a continuation of that club’s long tradition of playing attractive passing football.