Jamie Carragher believes “shocking” West Ham are one of the slowest ever teams in the Premier League and are at risk of being relegated while former Bournemouth and Wolves boss Gary O’Neil said they looked “lost”.
West Ham’s relegation concerns deepened with their fifth consecutive defeat at home as Brentford earned a deserved 2-0 win on Monday Night Football.
Nuno Espirito Santo is winless in his first three matches in charge with his new side sitting second from bottom in the Premier League and Sky Sports’ Carragher reckons the club’s poor performances are partly down to their “throwback” approach to transfers.
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FREE TO WATCH: Highlights from West Ham’s match against Brentford in the Premier League.
“Shocking and it’s been shocking for a while,” said Carragher of West Ham’s performance against Brentford. “It feels an awful long time ago since they won that European trophy under David Moyes.
“Sometimes we question supporters when they go against the club or they go against an ownership. A lot of the time, it’s almost a last resort and very rarely do supporters of their own football clubs get it wrong, they know exactly what is going on at this football club and it’s not down to managers.
“The ownership at West Ham now is completely different to what we’re seeing at the club that has just absolutely battered them on their own patch. It’s almost like a throwback in terms of how they go about transfers. It just doesn’t feel a modern way of doing things and I think that’s where that frustration comes from.
“They look at other clubs who are not a patch on West Ham and that’s not being disrespectful to Brentford and maybe a Brighton who we look at as forward-thinking, modern clubs.
“West Ham are far bigger club than those two clubs but the way they are run right now means that they can actually compete with them on the pitch.”
West Ham’s home form this season
Carragher highlighted West Ham’s lack of pace and energy as a major concern.
“I can’t think of a less athletic team I’ve seen for a very, very long time in the Premier League,” he said. “It’s one of the slowest teams I’ve seen in Premier League football.
“The first goal feels like a throwback to 40-50 years ago. It felt like everybody had all the time in the world and there was space. It was absolutely horrendous from a West Ham point of view.
“I feared for them at the start of the season because I felt that the promoted teams would be more competitive. West Ham, with that squad of players, no matter who the manager is, were always going to have a problem because that I don’t think they can cope physically.
“That wasn’t just a great footballing performance from Brentford, they absolutely bullied them. West Ham had to go to three at the back. They’re getting beat at home and you’re bringing defenders on because you can’t cope with Brentford. You’re not playing Man City, you’re not playing Arsenal, it was Brentford and they couldn’t cope.”
‘Nuno’s got a hell of a job to do’
O’Neil is worried whether West Ham, who sit second from bottom with four points, can stay in the Premier League. There is currenty a three-point gap to 17th-place Burnley and only winless Wolves sit below the Hammers.
“I was convinced that West Ham were going to be okay throughout the season. Having watched that, I have real concerns about them now,” he said.
“They look they look lost from a tactical perspective, of course Nuno’s only been there five minutes and he needs time, but they look lost, they look shot of confidence, they don’t look together.
“I think Brentford will finish somewhere in the six or seven towards the bottom of the league and they’ve just absolutely tore West Ham apart this evening at their home ground.
“That’s going to need a seismic shift that performance. Nuno’s got a hell of a job to get the team competitive in time to go to Elland Road in four days, because that’s an unforgiving stadium. They’re going to need a big improvement on that to stand a chance.”
Nuno: We have a problem at home
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Nuno Espirito Santo says his team can feel the fans’ concerns and they have to pull the fans together.
Nuno stressed how the atmosphere at the London Stadium is not helping his side
“I think we are all concerned. You can feel it from our own fans. You can see that they are concerned. And then this concern becomes silence. That silence becomes an anxiety. And we have a problem.
“It’s understandable. Since I arrived, clear awareness that it’s up to us to change this. Our fans must see something they like, something that pleases them, so they can support us and give us energy – like we feel it in the beginning of the game.
“Our fans were behind the team because the team was playing good. Then the momentum changed, that’s what we have.
“We try to ignore it. We try to make them feel that they [the players] have to be comfortable so they can express themselves well, but we cannot hide ourselves. It’s there to see.
“It’s there to see the situations that we have, passes not clicking, has to do with many aspects and mentally it’s one of the aspects that we have to swap.”
Analysis: West Ham are relegation fodder
Sky Sports’ Lewis Jones at The London Stadium:
Losing 5-1 to Chelsea was bad. But this was worse.
West Ham were expecting that their worrying start to the season would be remedied by a change of head coach. Yet this is a problem that runs deeper than whoever is leading them from the dugout.
Years of lazy and poor recruitment decisions are coming to bite this football club hard now. The fans are sick of it all. The squad of players we’re seeing aren’t built for the rigours of Premier League football.
Once again this West Ham side were bullied in the duels and lacked the ability to compete in key areas of the field. At one stage Tomas Soucek was playing in central midfield on his own after a tactical reshuffle and the results weren’t pretty.
With the newly promoted teams swinging hard and picking up points consistency, bad Premier League teams are going to get punished this season with the real threat of relegation. That is what West Ham are facing. They are very much in the scrap.
