Cod Almighty | Diary

It's a results game

23 October 2017

Open Diary writes: Saturday night was my tennis club's annual night out for the various team captains, of which I'm one, and it ended up in a local Indian restaurant with my being surrounded by people with various connections to West Ham United. A couple of them were season ticket holders who were bemoaning Slaven Bilic as a manager. Words like "clueless" and "doesn't know what he's doing" dropped from tongues well lubricated by the numerous bottles of Cobra beer which seemed to pass round the table.

Even the one person I knew to be a Spurs supporter was feeling their pain. I asked why, and he replied that his boss was a West Ham season ticket holder. He wasn't looking forward to work on Monday morning, which just goes to prove that business performance is still affected by what happens on Saturday afternoons.

As another clutch of Cobras arrived someone commented to me that "your lot" were doing OK. I had to think for a minute who they were referring to, only to be reminded that "we" had been regularly picking up points, hadn't we? Slightly taken aback to realise that the "we" they we referring to was, in fact, GTFC (I never realised they cared), I decided it was best to agree, only for that to lead to a discussion about the evident merits of following our example of swiftly offloading a failing manager and bringing in someone who knew what they were doing.

When I said that there wasn't universal approval about the way in which this apparent success was being achieved, I was sharply reminded that football is a results-orientated business. Our clean sheet at Morecambe hadn't gone unnoticed by those around the table; nor had the recent away successes. The West Ham season ticket holders reckoned that Sam Allardyce is the man they need and reminded me that it's not losing that matters most, even if it's not very pretty.

And, indeed, today marks exactly a month since we lost our last league match. That's six games unbeaten, a run which West Ham – and presumably Everton, who seem to be thinking about bringing David Moyes back – would give a lot for. Yes, that's the David Moyes who took Sunderland to the bottom of the Premier League last season.

But next month looks trickier. After Cambridge at home we have a long-distance cup tie away in the far south-west. Bringing Plymouth back for a replay would be something to savour and a result at Exeter would be good going. In the meantime both Slaven Bilic and Ronald Koeman may be wondering if they will last until next weekend.