When a team is an established part of English football’s upper echelons, plays its home games inside a 68,000-seater stadium and breaks the Championship transfer record immediately after relegation, there are expectations that naturally follow. By all accounts, West Ham are supposed to breeze through what is meant to be a brief dalliance with a second-tier existence.
So, to be three matches into the Championship season and yet to register a single win is understandably difficult for their supporters to stomach. If the boos from the travelling contingent were brief at the final whistle, the subsequent burst of “you’re getting sacked in the morning” directed at their team’s manager left no ambiguity over their thoughts. This type of thing is not meant to happen, and now Nuno Espírito Santo has found himself in the firing line.
How much is his fault will be debated. But when you suggest that spending £22m on Arne Engels is with a view to him playing in the Premier League – as Nuno did earlier this summer – you leave yourself with little wiggle room.
That this draw – which followed another against Burnley and defeat by Charlton – came against a Watford side openly treading water only compounded West Ham’s woes.
Credit must go to Alessio Dionisi and his team. So sparse are the options available to the Watford manager that he has recently been altering training sessions to cope with having so few first-team players at his disposal. A bench that included two goalkeepers and a solitary defender sent a message to those tasked with bringing in reinforcements in the closing days of the transfer window.
Thankfully, one of the few available is the unbridled talent of 19-year-old academy product Amin Nabizada, who is rapidly attracting attention in a breakout few weeks as Watford’s most potent weapon. The English-born Afghan international had never started a senior game prior to this season, but has been ever-present in Dionisi’s side so far this campaign and put the hosts ahead with his second glorious goal in three appearances.
With the ball at his feet on the left side of West Ham’s penalty area, a neat stepover worked space before he delicately curled his shot over Mads Hermansen, placing it neatly into the far top corner after 19 minutes.
For all that West Ham’s vigour rose as the match wore on, there was a hefty dose of fortune about an equaliser that arrived just eight minutes after Nabizada’s opener. Watford’s culprit was Kévin Keben, who attempted to shepherd the ball out of play on his own goalline, only for Valentín Castellanos to nick it off him and prod across goal where it deflected off the unfortunate Mattie Pollock and into the Watford net.
As Jarrod Bowen increasingly exerted his influence, so Watford dropped deeper. Hope grew among the West Ham fans, but such territorial dominance is their understandable expectation in the second tier: Bowen is a wonderfully talented player with 22 England caps, who was in contention for a World Cup spot, and he is surrounded by players with an abundance of Premier League experience.
Before the match, Dionisi had suggested it would require a combination of hard work, good luck and West Ham playing “so and so” for his Watford team to triumph. Even then, he admitted it would be “very difficult”. That they came close to doing so was as much a credit to his players as a measure of West Ham’s deficiencies.
The hosts had a moment to seize all the points with eight minutes remaining, when the Vicarage Road crowd rose to a rapid Watford break that culminated in Iker Bravo’s shot deflecting over the crossbar when he had sufficient time to pick his spot. It was not to be, but that West Ham managed just a single shot on target all match told a story.
