We had only played 3 games of the 08/09 season when the Chelsea (yeah Chelsea) ‘blue nose Zola’ arrived at the Boleyn we were 5th in the league at that stage and the year was full of promise.
Virtually with Curbs side, we/he finished the season in a very respectable ninth. Our Curbishley Hammers won 12 of our 35 games under Zola and we finished just two points off Europe and only behind the spuds on goal difference.
Zola came to us purporting to know and understand West Ham’s youth academy; although he came here as a novice he came with the experience of running the Italian U-21 side for a short while. Zola was said to understand the culture at the club and was to go on to give more opportunities to the young and upcoming players than any of his recent forerunners; the “project” if I heard it once I heard it a million times. But most youngsters were used out of a desperate need - to cover his failings - rather than being blooded in the correct manner to become an important integral part of our side as they had done so successfully in the past.
Has Zola’s inexperience ruined some of them; well that’s another debate but Freddie Sears springs rapidly to mind; are Tomkins and Stanislas (among others) suffering the same fate at the hands of our ‘manager's’ raw amateurishness? Quite a few of our youngsters were 'let go' recently too - 8 in all I think, not made the grade under Zola? Sad indictment for such a great player and national under 21 coach, isn't it? "The Project" of failure?
Zola began to ‘play with’ and experiment with the team, tactics and playing staff, his naïve inexperience and Steve Clarke’s seeming reluctance to get involved soon started to show and tell in all the wrong ways. Clarke I might add is another Chelsea ‘blue nose’ who was brought in to give Zola some much need know-how and support and add a little steel to the defence; defender himself – what a joke that has turned out to be with his hang-dog expression and the look of a street drunk, who’s body language sets himself separate and apart from this debacle, and yet he must accept that he is also to blame for our current abysmal plight – he too is just as culpable as Zola in my eyes. More so in some respects when you see the appalling and dreadful performances of our defenders.
Season 09/10 began and catastrophic collapse soon followed equivalent in disaster only to the French defeat of 1940 - today considered to be one of the most catastrophic military defeats of all time, until Zola and Clarkie began this season’s campaign for us beleaguered Hammers.
I could go on to make excuses for him- like the global credit crunch and subsequent collapse of the Icelandic banking system and the affect it had on West Ham - with all its ‘off-field’ disasters and distractions - or the injuries that we have continued to suffer under him for which Alan Curbishley was so wrongly blamed by so many during his tenure, but I won’t. The time for excuses has passed; it passed long ago when everyone at the club had grown so complacent they had become blindly contemptuous towards our great club and failed to see the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs was swinging around for another go now hurtling towards us unseen until Gollivan had to point it out by calling it Armageddon.
No the time for excuses for Zola – and Clarke – are gone. They are so-called managers of a premiership side that looked in a quite a good state of health until they took over; their apprenticeship has been the total demise of West Ham United Football Club in a relatively short space of time and could culminate in years of obscurity for us – maybe even league one football after next season – for the foreseeable future.
The Icelanders promised us Champion’s League football within five years of their takeover and they sold us a dream we all naively bought into only for it to be dashed. The remainder of their involvement at West Ham is all too obvious and far too painful to repeat anymore.
Gollivan have promise us a seven year plan to pull us back from the brink of the abyss, but only if we survive and maintain our current status in the best league in the world, anything less does not bear thinking about.
It’s time for Zola to stop acting like a Bambi caught in a gin trap and Steve Clarke to let go the “it’s got nothing to do with me” attitude, and between them get us out of this Titanic disaster they have gotten us into.
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