There were great goals in half an hour from Hammers man-of-themoment Antonio, two more super strikes in the space of five minutes from Watford’s Odion Ighalo and Troy Deeney – and a piece of wizardry from Payet to boot.
Advertisement
Friends reunited. West Ham’s Manuel Lanzini and new Watford midfielder Roberto Pereyra were once teammates at River Plate in their native Argentina.
The defeat is a third of the league season for West Ham, who sit 17th in the fledgling standings and have already crashed out of the Europa League.
West Ham’s collapse allowed new Watford manager Walter Mazzarri to claim his first win of the campaign. Daryl Janmaat hit the foot of his own post in a insane attempt to clear his lines.
West Ham has promised to enforce life bans as the Football Association prepares to investigate crowd trouble.
Although West Ham’s passing was a little slow for the next five minutes, they nearly increased their lead when Zaza supplied Lanzini for an extraordinary flick goal-ward. “Of course the second is terrible but the first one for me came from a very predictable attack, that we should have at least put them in a situation, where they had to do something better to hurt us”. But there were warnings for West Ham too.
Bilic added: “It was a really good 40 minutes with so many good actions. We did very well in the second half and it’s because of us that we had the win and not because of the poor defence of West Ham”. Speaking after the match, an angry Slaven Bilic said: “This, from my point of view, was way too easy”. It was nearly identical to his goal against Chelsea and was not only his third of the season but his third in three seasons, in fact, after two barren Premier League campaigns.
Incredibly, Watford exploded into life, and when James Collins and Adrian got into a tangle, the Hornets skipper expertly lifted the ball high into the roof of the net to restore parity.
Advertisement
“I can appreciate things like that, but when you’re still in the first half, I think it’s a little bit disrespectful to us”.
