Six reasons why West Ham will stay up

Nobody in the London Stadium saw it coming. A Hubble telescope wouldn’t have seen it coming, but 15 giddy, glorious minutes might have salvaged West Ham’s season. At the very moment the East London natives were beginning to turn restless, West Ham lashed four goals past hapless Nottingham Forest, who had hitherto exuded stalemate serenity.

Danny Ings scored a couple of plain-Jane goals. As Forest crumbled, Declan Rice curled a beauty past Keylor Navas and Michail Antonio’s header gave the scoreline the semblance of a rout.

The victory catapulted West Ham out of the relegation spots. Now, it’s time to build. Here’s how:

A new formation, a new style

Manager David Moyes had oscillated wildly between a back three and a back five. On Saturday, in the wake of a team meeting following Sunday’s defeat to Tottenham Hotspur, he plumped for a back four, Even when Vladimir Coufal’s heel forced him off at half-time, he stuck with it for the second.

Tomas Soucek, the poster boy for West Ham’s unsatisfying season, played in a more advanced role than of late and had his best game for some time. Moyes still seems wedded to a sole striker, but Soucek and Lucas Paqueta ensured Ings had proper support on his first start, unlike his struggling predecessors, Antonio and Gianluca Scamacca.

Performances weren’t that bad

It may be an oft-used line from the Moyes Playbook and even he looked uncomfortable delivering it after a supine showing when Leicester strolled to three points at the London Stadium just before Christmas. Yet, while West Ham had won just one league game since AFC Bournemouth were dispatched in October – albeit one which ended Frank Lampard’s tenure at Everton – he wasn’t wholly delusional. Sloppy defending turned three points into one at Elland Road; they overcame an early concession to secure a deserved point at Newcastle and, they matched Chelsea stride for stride a fortnight ago. Minor surgery was required rather than a heart transplant.

A Goalscorer... at last

Incredibly, Jarrod Bowen’s 18 goals last season was the most a West Ham player had scored since Marlon Harewood terrorised Championship defences in 2004-05. And only 12 were in the Premier League. Ings is a goalscorer: 104 goals from 239 league starts. The jury will be out for some time regarding his time at Aston Villa, but his first West Ham goals were his third brace of the season. Ings’s goals may have been aesthetically challenged, but they were a predatorial masterclass. “History never lies,” chuckled Angelo Ogbonna after Saturday’s game. “Danny has always been a top scorer wherever he’s played. He’s very bright in the box. I can describe him like a fox. Even in training, he has that sharpness.”

Lucas Paqueta looking interested

With the World Cup looming, Paqueta wrapped himself in cotton wool, disposed merely to avoid injury. After his return, he paid homage to the gods of iron by actually getting injured. Being deployed in a withdrawn position hardly played to his strengths, but against Forest, with no defensive duties to shackle him, he was a revelation in the centre of midfield, closer to Ings ahead of him than Rice behind him. Both Bowen and Said Benrahma benefitted from Paqueta’s vision and even tenacity, while Forest’s midfield could never get close to him. West Ham’s £51million investment finally looks like money well-spent.

Getting over the summer

Of those who arrived in the summer, only Paqueta and Nayef Aguerd started on Saturday, although Maxwel Cornet has been injured since October. Back in the autumn, Moyes argued his new men needed time, but now he seems to have concluded that Scamacca, Flynn Downes, Thilo Kehrer, Emerson – tellingly the four unused substitutes on Saturday - may not be a pathway to progression. When the old guard of Aaron Cresswell, Pablo Fornals and Antonio combined for West Ham’s fourth it felt like a restoration of the natural order.

Not sacking Moyes

He’s always claimed the noise surrounding his potential dismissal came only from outside the club. He maintained once again on Saturday, that there was no suggestion of regime change from within. Even with the pause for thought occasioned by joint chairman David Gold’s death, football rolled on relentlessly and the more elusive a victory became, the more precarious Moyes’s position became. Traditionally West Ham do not sack managers in haste and only Lou Macari and Avram Grant have failed to last a calendar year since Victoria was Queen. Moyes had enough in the bank. He has more now.

Danny Ings sparks 15-minute flurry that could save West Ham's season

For 70 minutes Nottingham Forest held off relegation-haunted West Ham United with a mixture of competence and calmness. Slowly, by almost imperceptible osmosis, the London Stadium drifted into sullen silence and West Ham manager David Moyes’s gamble of giving Danny Ings a first start despite fitness concerns seemed to be misfiring. Fifteen season-changing minutes later, West Ham were four goals to the good, two of them scored by Ings and the rather surprised stadium turned gleefully raucous. As James Callaghan didn’t actually say: “crises; what crisis?’.

With the vultures beginning to circulate and West Ham kicking off in the relegation spots with one league victory since October, Moyes not only introduced Ings, but tinkered with his formation, switching to a back four, deploying Tomas Soucek in a more offensive role and handing increased midfield responsibility to Lucas Paqueta.

For those 70 minutes it didn’t look like it was going to be Ings’s day any more than his team’s. In the first half, against the uncompromising yellow wall that was Joe Worrall and Felipe, Ings toiled manfully . He was unfortunate when Keylor Navas flapped at a Declan Rice corner and Paqueta – thriving on that responsibility - drove low across goal. Ings flicked the ball into Felipe’s path and the ball cannoned to safety off the post. Yet Ings was the very acme of rustiness shortly afterwards when an enticing Vladimir Coufal cross ended with Ings’s attempted header seeming to come off his face.

No matter. Redemption came in the 70th minute and it came again three minutes later. First, Ings began the opening goal’s move himself when he sprayed a fine cross-field pass to Jarrod Bowen, who hurtled down the right and crossed low. Worrall lost his bearings. Ings stretched out a leg to meet a ball that seemed to be going behind him, guided it past Navas.

Then, the Forest citadel was stormed, Paqueta had far too much muscle and nous for Neco Williams. He set Said Benrahma free and another low cross was bundled home by the predatorial Ings, who received a standing ovation when he was replaced by Michael Antonio with six minutes remaining.

“Danny is someone who knows the art of attacking,” said Moyes who became the third manager after Sir Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger to achieve 250 Premier League victories. “He makes runs where he should and his link-up play was good. I was surprised  when he missed the first half chance, but look at how he got across the defender for first. Both his goals were proper centre forward goals rather than a great finish or getting room in the box. That what you want from centre forwards.”

The rout that few saw coming, West Ham’s biggest league victory since a trip to Carrow Road last May, was complete when Declan Rice imperiously gambolled forwards, played a cute one-two with Benrahma and curled his first league goal at the London Stadium since May 2021 past the shell-shocked Navas.

Soon it was four goals in 15 giddy minutes when exquisite link play between two substitutes Aaron Cresswell and Pablo Fornals ended with the latter dinking a cross to the back post. A third substitute, Antonio, nodded in to complete what had turned out to be a glorious day.

If Ings had achieved redemption, so too had Moyes. His team had the best of the first half, had seen Coufal and Lukasz Fabianski forced off with injury and hit the post a second time when Bowen beat Navas with a daisy cutter, but Forest were beginning to impose themselves when the deluge hit.

“I’m not coming here with champagne and saying everything’s hunky dory,” he insisted. “But I’m thrilled. I’m going to have wine tonight. Why should I not? We’ve had bad days recently. I know there’ s been a lot of noise outside the club, but there’s been nothing inside: I’ve had incredible backing. To stay in a job, a manager needs good owners. I had it at Preston and Everton and it’s the same here.”

For Forest this was a troubling afternoon. They are still in danger of failing to eclipse the seven away goals Norwich City scored in 2019-20 – the fewest in Premier League history – and for all their doughty defending for 70 minutes, their abject collapse was as troubling as it was hard to predict.

“I cannot comprehend what happened,” sighed Steve Cooper, the Forest head coach. “We were never in danger of conceding and you could feel the tension growing in the stadium. It sounds a little bit silly in light of what happened, but things looked about to go in our favour before the first goal. What happened after it was completely unacceptable, but we have nobody to blame but ourselves. We need to get back to the training ground and have a grown-up conversation about this.”