It certainly has been, as the Premier League lines up to rush madly down this final leg, an engrossing season.
In 2015-16 we’ve all been treated to a fresh footballing repast, our stale palates revived with crisp, tart flavours, a Technicolor, Pan-esque feast that makes the sepia-toned, predictable drudgery of previous years seem even less appealing in memory.
Few clubs have dined more willingly on this piquancy than West Ham, and their portion has been especially delicious, thanks in large part to the tactical boldness of their manager, Slaven Bilic.
Every good meal needs seasoning, and variety, they say, is the spice of life. The Hammers have been left sated as a result, pleasantly plumped by Bilic’s willingness to experiment, to adjust dramatically to tactical challenges, to offer a stunning alternative to last season’s monotony.
Bilic has been able to do this, it goes without saying, because the squad he has built – and, in part, inherited – is so wonderfully multi-faceted. But, just as a workshop full of tools still needs an able craftsman to wield them properly, Bilic has deployed this squad, in all of its many forms, masterfully.
The tone was set almost immediately into his tenure. We must remember, and appreciate, the sort of brass it must have taken to start Reece Oxford, 16 at the time, in defensive midfield on the opening day of the season against Arsenal.
Oxford is elegant, long-limbed and athletic, but to pit him against Mesut Ozil, the league’s most accomplished playmaker, was a decision that could have backfired horribly. It didn’t, and West Ham ran out 2-0 winners.
The counter-attacking system Bilic constructed, centred around Oxford’s ability to protect and aid the defence, and Dimitri Payet and Mauro Zarate’s ability to create space while under heavy pressure in midfield, functioned perfectly. When Oxford was substituted for Kevin Nolan – who was, then, still the club captain – it underlined the change in mindset.
But more brain-flexing was still to come. West Ham continued to excel away from home, but a worrying frailty in defence began to emerge, especially when the team was obligated to take the initiative against opponents at Upton Park.
The team kept only three clean sheets over the first 15 games of the season. Something had to be fixed, and when a glut of injuries hamstrung the attack – at one point Payet, Manuel Lanzini, Diafra Sakho, Victor Moses and Enner Valencia were all injured – a solution simply had to be formulated. The undoing of all of the early season’s good work had to be avoided, and Bilic abandoned a tenet of his gameplan to solidify the defence.
As much as Carl Jenkinson’s shaky defending had hampered the Hammers in the first 12 games, his attacking from the right-back position was crucial, to compensate for Payet and Lanzini’s penchant for drifting in from the flanks. With Aaron Cresswell on the opposite flank, the full backs provided most of the width in the team. But Bilic removed Jenkinson and replaced him with James Tomkins, a supremely assured defender, on the right.
The team was lopsided in attack, but Tomkins shored up the defence almost instantly. Following the 4-1 defeat to Spurs in November, a woeful nadir, Jenkinson started just two of the next 10 games. Tomkins replaced him, and West Ham conceded just eight goals over that period.
We’ll come back to the right-back position later. In the meantime, let’s consider Andy Carroll. Bilic has agonised over exactly how to use his club’s record signing, strangely so, in many ways; not all of Bilic’s decisions have paid off, and his flirting with Carroll as the starting striker hasn’t really helped the team. The Geordie has scored four goals this season, three of those as a substitute, and three of those scored after the hour mark.
Diafra Sakho’s injury woes allowed for a lot of the starting opportunities given to Carroll, but it is no surprise that the period in which Carroll was the main striker was the lowest-scoring of West Ham’s season. His open-play abilities simply do not gel well with Payet’s, and as the Hammers’ attack is usually funnelled through the Frenchman, this was a problem.
But – and this is a crucial point – Carroll’s frightening aerial virtues are the perfect foil to Payet’s skills in dead-ball situations, and against tired defenders, Carroll can be nearly unstoppable if given the right deliveries to attack. It all points to the striker being used almost exclusively as an impact substitute; the stats are clear. Of 12 the matches where Carroll has entered the match as a substitute, West Ham have lost only one. Of the six matches he has started, West Ham have won only one. Bilic’s experimentation produced a clear result, and he has acted in accordance with it; Carroll has been a used substitute in all of the last six matches.
But let’s now return to the right-back spot. Another injury glut, this time in defence, again forced Bilic to reinvent his tactical system. With Jenkinson badly injured – and returned to Arsenal as a result – and James Tomkins and Sam Byram also out, Slaven Bilic tested out Michail Antonio as an aggressive wing-back, reshaping the back line to accommodate the Englishman.
This month, against Tottenham and Everton, Bilic played three centre backs, pushing Antonio and Cresswell up the pitch. When James Collins was injured against Spurs, it even saw the reintroduction of Oxford – who had played only 72 minutes since the opening day – at centre back to maintain the integrity of the system.
It was a ploy that relied heavily on Antonio’s astonishing work-rate; just watching the 25-year-old hare up and down that right flank almost induced a stadium-wide epidemic of empathetic cardiacs. Antonio banked, successfully if a little haphazardly, on his athleticism to conceal his unpolished defensive instincts. He scored in the game against Spurs, and was one of West Ham’s best performers in the Hollywood comeback against Everton.
Antonio had already usurped Victor Moses as the starting right-winger, and has now, in a new position, just further proven his – and, by extension, Bilic’s – extraordinary ability to adapt.
These moments – critical in the context of West Ham’s best Premier League season in some years – of course say nothing about the day-to-day demands of Bilic’s job, the squad-building, the constant need to maintain momentum and morale. What they do show, in rare starkness to the lumpen obdurateness of last season, is Bilic’s boldness, his fearlessness to test on the fly, to reinvent his approach.
It hasn’t always worked perfectly on the day, and often changes have taken multiple beta iterations to get right. But his willingness to reevaluate, successfully or otherwise, has kept the tempo of this remarkable season thumping in unison with the heartbeats of the enraptured faithful.
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