How Nuno Espirito Santo can transform West Ham fortunes ahead of Arsenal trip | OneFootball

Hammers have won just won game all season

West Ham are embarking on a new era under Nuno Espirito Santo, but even he is unsure what that looks like after less than a week in the job.

The future, however, presents a less clear picture, with West Ham still struggling to carve out an identity for themselves two years after winning the Conference League.

Nuno himself is not sure what that future looks like. The ‘West Ham way’, he says, is a feeling, based on actions rather than words.

It is all well and good, for example, saying Konstantinos Mavropanos had to be braver when Everton centre-half Michael Keane headed home after 18 minutes during Nuno’s first game in charge, but what does that actually look like?

"That we have to compete. That we have to compete. That we have to compete,” Nuno repeated in his first pre-match press conference as West Ham boss.

“This is the main message that has been passed to me. That we need to compete.

"We need to be strong. We need to be aggressive. We need to be brave. This is the West Ham way.

These are all questions where the answers will become more apparent to Nuno over the coming weeks, and luckily for West Ham fans, they need only to look back at the work Nuno did in turning Nottingham Forest from relegation candidates to European contenders for evidence of how quickly he can arrest a team’s slump in form.

Short-term success feels inevitable; it is hard not to improve on a run of four losses from five games. What comes next, though, has always been West Ham’s issue.

Nuno wants to bring balance; his West Ham side cannot attack without a solid defensive base, and unsurprisingly, much of his early work on the training ground has centred on defensive organisation.

“We have to find the balance. My approach is to find the balance. We cannot attack with an unbalanced way because we open spaces and freedom for our opponents.“

But will that be progressive enough for a club that sacked David Moyes a year after lifting their first European title since 1965 in search of a more attacking identity? Time will tell.

For now, Nuno is only focusing on this weekend’s trip to the Emirates Stadium, where a beleaguered West Ham side have found fortune against Arsenal in recent years.

The proof of his work, though, will come in how convincingly rather than how quickly he can communicate his ideas. He has to make West Ham players and fans believe in a common goal.