Summary
So, our away form overall is a lot stronger than what it was last season, besides the very end of it. Pretty much overall, away Forest has been utterly tortured in the Premier League
Hey, how’s it going? Welcome to RADS. This is my match preview for West Ham versus Nottingham Forest. Yeah, graphic love it, brilliant stuff. They’re no mugs, West Ham. They have the likes of Y Bowen, Mohamed Kudos, James W Prow, such quality players in that team. Michail Antonio, X red, how you doing, mate?
However, everyone knows that West Ham has a lot of inconsistency about them. So, therefore, there’s no reason at all why we can’t go into this game with confidence following that win. But also, the opposition is a bit unpredictable. Looking at their last five games, it pretty much defines where they are. A win against Olympios, they’ve already beaten Manakis once this week. Let’s not make it twice. Hey, Forest, yeah, lost to Brentford when they really shouldn’t have done. They should have got something out of that game. Beat Arsenal convincingly in the League Cup, lost to Everton, lost to Olympios, and they’ve only kept three clean sheets in the Premier League all season. In fact, I lie, that’s so wrong with me. How dare I lie to you? They’ve only kept three clean sheets in all competitions this season, and just one in the Premier League.
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Last season, we had two polar opposite games against West Ham. A win in our opening Premier League game at the City Ground back in the Premier League, which was incredibly special. [Applause] What? And then, yeah, the second game was one of the worst games I’ve ever seen from Forest. It was just diabolical. A 4-0 loss. What am I looking at there? Unacceptable, honestly, lost for words.
So believe it or not, it’s not really a shock to say that we’ve never won at West Ham’s new stadium, which is an incredible stadium. Besides the fact that it is about 50 miles away from the pitch. I would like to just get a much more positive result than what we did last year. And it should be very different to last year because, for starters, we are better on the road now. It still is definitely a work in progress. If you look at the team that played that game last year at West Ham, there’s only really Mbe Guehi and White that’s probably going to start on the weekend. Yes, we still have Worrall and Nico Williams. They’re not really in favor, especially Joe W right now. Chris Wood’s also injured as well, so that doesn’t really help the case for keeping that team together. And we’re a much better team now than what we were then.
The last time we won at West Ham in any form was a 1-0 win back in 1997 at the old Upton Park, a goal from Kevin Campbell to give us a 1-0 win in the Premier League. But, as I’ve already said, West Ham continued to be very, very inconsistent. It always feels like David Moyes is on thin ice whenever they have any kind of barren run of form. But then they go and get a result like they did against Arsenal, a result that they did just the other day against Olympios, and suddenly he’s pretty safe in his job. They’ve genuinely done very well throughout this period when they have been a European-level team. But right now, unless they win the Europa League, they’re not going to be in it again next year because they are currently 12th in the Premier League, just one place above us and one point above us, I believe, as well.
So it should be a really evenly matched game. As I’ve already said, inconsistency is what defines West Ham. It’s a really big opportunity based on how that Villa game went for Forest and the fact that West Ham are arguably worse than us right now because Forest already lost one in recent games, whereas West Ham have lost three. Oh yeah, and also, they’ve conceded the most goals in the league. That might be a bit of a shock because I did not expect it to be West Ham that conceded the most goals in the league, but they have 20 goals conceded by them this season, on par with Brighton, another team that you probably wouldn’t suspect to be in that category. But they’ve also scored the seventh most goals in the league, so they can definitely score goals, but they also really cannot keep goals out. So I’ll be disappointed if we don’t score in this match at the very least.
Injury news to West Ham, there’s only really Kurt Zouma missing potentially for this game. Other than that, everyone pretty much is available for the Hammers. Anyway, looking at a much bigger and more important team, Nottingham Forest, injury news: Hson Dy and Gonzalo Montio are both back in training, which is very encouraging. Not sure if they’re going to be available for this game or not, so we’ll see about that probably after the international break. How many international breaks, by the way? Three international breaks. FIP, P Ori, and Chris Wood remain out. Not sure about Wood actually because he is actually in the New Zealand squad for the Internationals coming up. Is that just, you know, precaution? He may be in there, he may not be in there. Like, you know, Madison’s already pulled out of the England team. Is it a bit like that? Is W just there because they want him to be, but he’s not fit enough? I’m not sure.
So, our away form overall is a lot stronger than what it was last season, besides the very end of it. Pretty much overall, away Forest has been utterly tortured in the Premier League. And that’s not too much of a surprise. But since the end of last season, we absolutely have improved that away form. We’re a lot, lot more well in every single way better. We’re much, much better away from home. But we still have only actually won one game in this period where everyone’s saying we’re doing better away. Of course, that Chelsea game, a draw against Palace, that’s it. That’s it. Of course, we had an incredibly tough set of games to start us away from home, five of the big six away in one go, which in a way is good because now we don’t have to face any of them besides Spurs. And then I think you can put Newcastle in the list of difficulty, arguably more than quite a few of them big six clubs in ways, and then Villa, the way they’re playing too. The encouraging thing is really is there’s only Liverpool in those five big six away games where we didn’t at all put on a show or do any kind of justice to ourselves. It was a really disappointing game, nothing to scream about at all. City, we gave them a very good go, Arsenal kind of unlucky in ways towards the end of that game. Beat Chelsea and we’re robbed against Man United. But of course, United don’t get any decisions according to Eric Dier. I doubt it