Stating the obvious here but we were very good and West Ham were criminally bad. I don’t think there are many teams that could live with us in this form, but West Ham sure as shit aren’t one of them and that made for the easiest game we’ve had all season.
On Sky they were calling us “ruthless” and “clinical” because we won 5-0, but I couldn’t disagree more. We won 5-0 despite being wasteful as fuck. Mo on his own should have scored five, never mind the rest of the team. He got one and had two more assists, earning him the man of the match award yet again, but that’s the absolute minimum he should have had from this game. He knows it too, you could tell afterwards he’ll be thinking about some of those missed chances for a few days.
To win 5-0 and still miss a load of chances says a lot about just how superior we are to everyone else currently. Chelsea or Arsenal on their best day can probably do similar, but we can do this in third gear. I’m not even especially buzzing about it, as it just felt kind of routine to me. It’s what we should be doing when a team is as hopeless as West Ham.
I have to hand it to Lopetegui. It’s not easy to name such a defensive line up and still be easier to play through than Spurs. Our lads have not had an easier game all season, and I include Spurs in that. We had to work relatively hard to make Spurs look THAT bad and as soon as we dropped our intensity they scored a couple of goals and had us under pressure.
West Ham just never got near us when we had the ball, and other than individual moments from Kudus they offered nothing in response when they had it. Paqueta was a disgrace and Bowen was invisible. Even the worst teams in the league we’ve faced have at least made things difficult for us. Very few have taken points from us, but Wolves, Palace, Southampton, Ipswich and even Leicester last week made us work to get the points. West Ham were embarrassing.
That isn’t our problem though. You still have to go out and beat the opponent, irrespective of how they look. And we did that, emphatically. As I said, I don’t see it as being amazing and I’m not reading too much into the performance. But I tell you what, with each passing result like this one and the Spurs one, it sucks the fight out of the chasers. Imagine being eight, nine, ten points behind a team that goes and scores six at Spurs and then five at West Ham. A team that has only lost once all season. Results like this are worth more than the three points, because the psychological effect is huge. You drain all hope from the competition.
Nottingham Forest are second and I guarantee you that neither their manager or any of their players are looking up at us with any ambitions of chasing us down. I bet it’s the same at Chelsea. Arsenal are the only ones still harbouring hopes of chasing us down and winning the title, but those hopes are hanging by a thread and if they lose either of the tough away games they have before we play again, they might give up the ghost too.
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