West Ham handed major survival boost as Spurs and Forest count cost of ‘success’ | OneFootball

There are two key quirks in this season’s run-in battles.

First, you have Manchester United challenging for the Champions League while having absolutely no other commitments to worry about whatsoever and a team so fresh on its once-a-week schedule that Luke Shaw is able to play every single game.

At the other end of the table you have the perhaps even greater absurdity of two teams in desperate trouble still having European games to squeeze in.

Thanks to a classic piece of mischief from our old friend the fixture computer, these two dafties even come up against each other in a potentially season-defining six-pointer the weekend after the conclusion of their business in the last 16 of the Champions League and Europa League.

Spurs and Forest are of course those two dafties in question, and the added stress of those absurdly luxurious side projects could be of huge significance.

The obvious beneficiaries are West Ham, who are not in Europe and thus have potentially a far fresher squad for the battles ahead – especially having also taken meaningful action to bolster their numbers in January.

The numbers are clear. Both Spurs and Forest have seven outfield players with more than 2000 minutes of football in their legs this season already; the Hammers have just two.

Nikola Milenkovic of Forest is way over 3000 minutes. Morgan Gibbs-White, Neco Williams and Tottenham’s Micky van de Ven will join him in the 3000 club on their next appearances. Elliot Anderson and Pedro Porro aren’t far behind.

The importance of Jarrod Bowen to West Ham is signposted by the fact he’s still managed over 2600 minutes in a non-Europe season, but no other Hammer is anywhere near those numbers. Mateus Fernandes clears 2000 minutes by less than one half of one game.

Players who have become increasingly influential over the Hammers’ recent upturn in form – your Aaron Wan-Bissakas, your Crysencio Summervilles – are relatively lightly raced.

How this all pans out depends largely on Tottenham’s injury crisis. If – and it must be acknowledged this is an if visible from space, one doing so much heavy lifting it’s about to start a toxic podcast about how women are just awful – they can get significant numbers of their walking wounded back on the park then they might, counter-intuitively, find themselves in position to benefit from some freshness for the run-in.

We’ve already seen this to an extent with Dominic Solanke making some difference to Tottenham’s otherwise miserable existence.

Pedro Porro, for instance, should return soon and looks one player ideally suited to Igor Tudor’s methods. A month’s rest isn’t what he or Spurs wanted or needed at the time, but it might help them out of a tricky spot in the end.

The fear – and in truth more likely scenario – is that Spurs simply do not have the numbers to survive. In every sense. There’s something unavoidably Spursy about the way their success in the Champions League this season could cost them everything.

It helped Thomas Frank in a job long past the point where sacking him would have been a kindness and has stretched an unbalanced and thin squad well beyond its elastic limit.

That Van de Ven’s hamstrings haven’t gone ping this season is a miracle, but there has been clear evidence in recent weeks that the strain of leading this slapstick defence has got to him. Especially as Cristian Romero is so adept at securing himself regular rests.

Somehow, Spurs spent 17 years desperately believing a trophy was all they wanted and needed yet have now discovered to their horror that winning one was not the springboard to greater things but a gateway to hell.

And somewhere out there sits a sheepish Spurs fan holding a monkey’s paw and wishing he’d listened to the warnings of a Moroccan shopkeeper.