It’s been a terrible opening few weeks to the 2022-23 Premier League season for West Ham and with three losses from three, the pressure is already on a team undergoing major changes. There are a whole host of new faces in the group with a number of key squad players and leaders leaving over the summer. And the coaching team has changed too with Stuart Pearce’s departure and Mark Warburton’s appointment.
While things shift in the background, the foreground has remained much the same with almost exactly the same cast of characters from MD38 last season producing a similarly limited performance against Graham Potter’s Brighton. So, what is it about Brighton that David Moyes finds quite so difficult? Why do the Seagulls always seem to have an extra player on the pitch? And can West Ham find a way to beat them in the future?
The build-up to Sunday’s match was anxiety-inducing enough for me, never mind the players. The atmosphere around West Ham has shifted dramatically in an incredibly short space of time with murmurings growing through a limp preseason campaign and transforming into a kind of clamouring just a couple of weeks into the season. You felt beforehand that, should things go wrong, this could develop into a particularly difficult moment for West Ham. And that is exactly what transpired.
At the start of Sunday’s match, the players came out with the right level of intensity to address the negative string of results and we were barely a minute in when Pablo Fornals’ screening of Alexis Mac Allister in combination with Jarrod Bowen’s pressure forced an uncharacteristic mistake out of Adam Webster that allowed Saïd Benrahma to race down the left and get a shot away on goal. His shot faded wide but the blueprint for what Moyes wanted to achieve in this match was already clear.
Where West Ham had played a 4222 in the final game of last season against Brighton and had been well beaten in midfield, the approach this time was to revert to the more familiar 4231 and exert a high press on Brighton’s centre-backs in order to create turnovers which the team would be able to transition forwards from quickly. Fornals was pushed high alongside Antonio to effect pressure on Robert Sánchez and Lewis Dunk while Benrahma and Bowen took care of Joel Veltman and Webster. If West Ham could rush Brighton enough, then they wouldn’t be able to progress the ball into their dominant midfield and they would either turn the ball over and create attacking opportunities for the Hammers or be forced to go long where Danny Welbeck would, in theory, lose the duel with Thilo Kehrer and Kurt Zouma.
The system had some success. And in the opening 20 minutes, although Brighton had more control of the match, neither team were really able to create any openings. That was until Zouma lost the ball in midfield and Kehrer decided to dive in on Welbeck, concede a penalty and make an already challenging task so much harder.
This goal came as a result of two things. One: Partnering Kehrer with Zouma which is a short-term necessity given Aguerd’s injury and the surrounding fitness issues in the area – Kehrer and Zouma are both aggressive players who want to make things happen on, and off, the ball; without a covering defender alongside them, they can look a little rash. And two: A lack of energy and enthusiasm in the second phase of build-up.
The latter was a key area in which West Ham lost the game on Sunday.
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