West Ham sink further into Championship quicksand; ‘we’ll be back here next year’

Back to the old. I didn’t go to Cardiff University, but several of my mates did and walking around the city centre brought back some repressed memories.

Patchy nights on sticky dancefloors, cheap Jagerbombs, Temperature by Sean Paul thudding its way into my brain like a pneumatic drill and picking at an all-day breakfast while pining for my duvet.

Cardiff hasn’t changed much. It feels more like a provincial town than a capital city. But horizons have shifted since then and the past doesn’t have quite the same appeal.

West Ham appointing Scott Parker as manager has felt pre-destined, a throwaway line in the Old Testament. Now, sinking into the EFL quicksand, Parker is back to resume the role as the club’s saviour.

The logic is clear: he’s won promotion with three different clubs and West Ham would go into financial meltdown if they stay down.

Parker couldn’t save West Ham from relegation as a player. In fairness, Jesus Christ would have struggled to feed the 5000 if his disciples were Wayne Bridge and a greying Robbie Keane.

I felt nothing when Nuno was sacked. The hope-baiting run of form last spring was down to Paco off the pitch and Axel Disasi on it. He had 33 games to keep West Ham up and p*ssed half of them away.

This year has been even more muddled, playing low-wattage sideways football and relying on Jarrod Bowen to rise above it all.

Even the Athletic long-read into his departure was tame; the detail of him smashing a tactics board at Burnley stretched to within an inch of its life.

But the prospect of returning to the Premier League makes me feel empty too. Perhaps I’m terminally miserable, but my overriding feeling is that West Ham haven’t learnt their lesson.

Everything is short-term. Picking Parker is solely about promotion. If that works, next year would be solely about staying up. And the year after. Where’s the overriding vision or the sense of a plan being put in place?

I was there at Nuno’s first game, Graham Potter’s too. Both were last year, which feels both inconceivable and a perfect encapsulation of the modern West Ham.

Still, reduced status has its consolations. The ticket at Cardiff was a paper one and the programme has a wonderfully designed collage on the front that didn’t automatically set off my AI radar.

Fast forward an hour and the night air was filled with chants of ‘You’re not fit to wear the shirt’. Even by West Ham standards, the atmosphere was mutinous.

Cardiff were 2-0 up and scored a third straight afterwards. Their fans started crowing about Parker getting sacked in the morning. Funny, but I did start wondering if this is the nadir or simply the latest one.

Every player could have been imprisoned under the Trade Descriptions Act. Parker has the same view as three are hauled off at half-time.

The fans get a bad rap, mocked for perceived delusions of grandeur. Nobody associated with the club has uttered the words ‘West Ham way’ in decades, yet it’s still regularly weaponised by those punching downwards.

But when the team emerged with guts and drive, the away end was immediately behind them. It doesn’t take much.

Two goals were pulled back quickly. Even before that, I just knew they wouldn’t lose and not just because Joel Piroe actually held the ball up. More a wave of certainty born from conviction.

West Ham piled forward, Bowen dictating everything and Parker kicking every ball. The equaliser was inevitable, less inevitable that it came from Max Kilman, who still has Chuckle Brother moments in the second tier.

The celebrations were visceral and raw. My theory is that football’s biggest emotional releases are born from defiance; I lost my sh*t more when Callum Wilson ‘scored’ against Arsenal in May than at the Conference League final.

It’s why some Manchester City fans are currently having the time of their lives. I thought of the unopened group chats, happily dunking on West Ham at 3-0 down and indifferent now. Of the wider media only interested in rubbernecking at our failures. F*ck them and everyone else.

Cardiff fans wear the same thousand-yard stare I know so well. ‘Are you West Ham in disguise?’ soundtracks their misery. I noticed that my legs were still shaking.

Three days later and 7000 Hammers were at Blackburn. Almost all of them were back-seat drivers during a dull first half as Wednesday’s goodwill dribbled away.

‘Atrocious,’ declared one massive unit behind me, bald and offering one-word verdicts between puffs on his vape. His mate splattered my neck with spittle as final balls kept going astray.

Perhaps ‘atrocious’ was a slight exaggeration – if nothing else, it leaves you nowhere to go when West Ham bottom out – but there was nothing to cheer. After a brief second-half flurry, Blackburn went straight up the other end and scored.

Mads Hermansen appeared to jump over the downward header and around 30 Blackburn youths rushed to goad the away support from behind a metal fence.

Hermansen is the new designated scapegoat, booed whenever he touches the ball. This is harsh, someone suggested loudly, as all of the players should be getting booed. Choruses of ‘You’re not fit to wear the shirt’ started up again.

It’s hard to disagree with the sentiment, but twisted: the fans are too good for the club. Parker croaked as much afterwards, sounding alarmingly like Sean Dyche. West Ham’s fanbase has always been disproportionately large compared to the team’s historical success.

I genuinely started getting a headache, so my gaze turned to the sunset and the way it hit the brown autumn leaves on the trees behind the stand.

Would hiking somewhere have been a more productive day off? It certainly would have been more wholesome. I don’t feel rested or recuperated, just increasingly downbeat at something that’s out of my control.

“We’ll be back here next year,” said the bald unit as Blackburn scored again and fans began to file out.

Promotion hopes aren’t lost yet, but years of dysfunction and hurt are starting to coalesce into a new reality. This might be it for some time.