West Ham’s Premier League season has gotten off to a bad start with just one win in their opening five games. I don’t want to hide away from that.
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Careering from one calamity to another, amid security issues at the London Stadium and increasingly desperate form on the pitch, this was not how the future was envisaged when they left Upton Park last season.
The defence were torn apart as the Baggies went four goals up and a comeback thanks to Michail Antonio and Manuel Lanzini goals never really materialised.
West Bromwich Albion defender Jonny Evans has acknowledged that he and his teammates are keen to ensure that Tony Pulis remains at The Hawthorns. We defended as a unit – like brothers – to be solid and very tough and then we tried to do it with players who have skill and quality.
It was the first game of the Guochuan Lai era and there had been a degree of uncertainty around Pulis’s position after a reported fall-out with the board over transfer business. “We spoke about that before the game”, Evans said.
The 28-year-old is quoted by the Express & Star as saying: “Obviously Tony Pulis is the manager and he’s got a well known way of playing football”.
“Saturday showed you that we’re fighting for him and fighting for ourselves”. We have reputations to keep and the one thing Tony Pulis does with his teams is he gets them working hard.
Evans insists the players are behind their manager.
Albion claimed three (relatively!) comfortable points on Saturday after putting four goals past West Ham. “They leave a lot of players high up for the counter attack and we knew if we were patient and worked the ball in the final third, we could hurt them”. “They are just looking around like oh another one’s gone in let’s get on with the game, it’s unacceptable”.
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“We watched a studied them and saw that not always do they work back with their wingers”, explained Evans.
