West Ham survival on after groundbreaking Nuno tactic: Playing a striker | OneFootball

Here at Football365 we encourage you to write about your clubs. Reader Joe Farrell did just that with West Ham…

In 2019 it was £45million Sébastien Haller; in 2022 it was £35million Gianluca Scamacca, and last year it was £27million Niclas Füllkrug. The players and the transfer fees change, but the story remains the same: West Ham United have squandered a cumulative £103.5million trying to find a striker who can score a goal since Marko Arnautović.

You have to give it to the fans – every year they get behind the latest superstar that David Sullivan and Karen Brady convince to join the club, but the enthusiasm always fades as the injuries pile up, the goal droughts drag on, or Danny Ings starts for the fifth successive week.

It would be easy to label these players as ‘injury-prone flops’, but the truth is deeper: it’s the system that keeps failing these big-money signings.

This year was no different. The wizard himself, Graham Potter, decided he wanted his strike-force to resemble a retirement home. Having watched Füllkrug’s form last season, he refused to invest in a younger, more dynamic striker. Instead, he brought in Hammer-killer Callum Wilson…straight off the treatment table.

Hammers fans were begging for a striker in the summer window, especially as they watched their rivals inject youth into their forward line with Benjamin Sesko, Viktor Gyökeres, Nick Woltemade, Igor Jesus, while West Ham somehow managed to look worse up front after losing Michail Antonio. And let’s be honest: most Hammers would take Antonio back in a heartbeat.

The season, as many predicted, has been a mess: minimal spending, a mediocre manager (not you, Nuno, you haven’t let us down…yet), and a striker situation bordering on an Adam Sandler comedy. Füllkrug looks like he’s playing for a move to non-league German football, and Potter stranded two of West Ham’s best, Lucas Paquetá and Jarrod Bowen, on a desert island up top.

The result? Fans begging for Paquetá to be benched. Paquetá? £85million Man City target Paquetá? Brazilian international Paquetá? Potter desperately played himself out of a job, and eventually he succeeded.

Since Nuno Santo took charge, aside from a couple of decisions that might be blamed on overdoing it the night before, he’s had one crazy idea to solve the striker issue: play a striker as a striker.

And unbelievably, it has worked.

Wilson, albeit not half the footballer Bowen or Paquetá is, is consistently providing effective hold-up play and giving West Ham the ability to go long. His form, combined with Tomáš Souček’s purple patch (four goals in four games for club and country), means West Ham are actually scoring goals and may yet avoid trips to Blackburn and Preston next season.

The numbers aren’t groundbreaking: Wilson has 0.58 npxG/90 versus Füllkrug’s 0.36. But we don’t need groundbreaking. Sitting 18th in the table, we need results. And so far, the Wilson-Souček combination has been paying dividends.

Who knows what January will bring? But I, for one, am fully willing to let my heart get broken again and welcome the next striker unlucky enough to sign for West Ham as the new Messiah.