West Ham 0 – 2 Wolves
by Daniel Nolan
at the London Stadium

WHAT makes West Ham’s ground their own isn’t the retrofitted furniture or a handful of memories, but the presence of 60,000 fans.

Without them, it’s not the football that raises neck hairs, but the tributes — in front of London’s most cavernous stands — that our times demand.

A silence for the pandemic’s dead, actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter and the playing of Vera Lynn’s Bubbles were haunting, all the more so in a setting that is characterised by distance and abjection.

 “Football is not enjoyable without the fans in the stadium,” Nuno Espirito Santo intoned after Wolves’ 2-0 win — ensured by his unleashing of Adama Traore only after the Hammers’ defence was cooked for 64 minutes. 

“So we have to perform for the people back home. Hopefully, we can go back to what it was before as, without fans, it has no meaning at all.”

In another year marked by disputes with supporters — peaking before lockdown with a thousand-strong march and banning of a flag bearer — West Ham’s search for meaning still turned to its absent fans.

“We missed the atmosphere, that’s what we’re going to have to get better at dealing with,” David Moyes said after the whistle.

But the emerging picture of lockdown football is that glittering individual performances are needed to overcome the void of noise, as well as the rustiness of months without team practices.

Even Wolves, for the best part of 70 minutes, played out a predictable strategy — attacking the space left by marauding right-back Jeremy Ngakia — and were unable to capitalise on seven corners and a handful more free kicks.

It was Traore, striding on with imperious confidence, who had the necessary magic — equally at ease skinning Aaron Cresswell and Pablo Fornals to assist Raul Jimenez’s headed opener, or laying off to Matt Doherty for his own assist on the second — a blistering far-post volley by Pedro Neto that demands rewatching.

And while there were spirited performances for the home side, with a passionate defensive effort by Declan Rice and flashes of inspiration in attack from Michal Antonio, they have no player with the impact to win matches alone.

Indeed, that Ngakia — who shone in attack — is due to leave in a matter of days sums up the club’s predicament.

In a match day programme that hardly dealt with football at all in its first 40 pages, fans were assured: “We will be back together soon. Until [we] are, you will be right at the heart of our thinking when our nine remaining matches are played.”

Those relegation-fearing supporters will be praying that someone emerges soon to lead West Ham out of even more troubled times.