Het Grote WEST HAM UNITED topic #4 Fortune's always hiding!

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Op zondag 5 februari 2012 01:51 schreef Spezza19 het volgende:
Was een leuk dagje!

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Op dinsdag 14 februari 2012 23:34 schreef GuRBuH het volgende:
Weer geen winst, en weer een rode kaart en weer een penalty

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Op woensdag 15 februari 2012 07:12 schreef Spezza19 het volgende:

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Hoezo weer geen winst? Tegen millwall hebben we toch echt 2-1 gewonnen

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Op woensdag 15 februari 2012 18:44 schreef Spezza19 het volgende:
Nee duh maar jij hebt het over WEER geen winst ;-)

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Op donderdag 16 februari 2012 17:21 schreef Insomnia_ het volgende:
Dinsdag voor het eerst op upton park erbij geweest. Was mooi.

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Op donderdag 16 februari 2012 18:57 schreef Spezza19 het volgende:

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Ja ik kom er ook graag.
Hangt altijd een leuke sfeer. Eens kijken of ik nog 1 of 2 wedstrijden kan bezoeken dit seizoen.
Liefst kampioenswedstrijd ofzo

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Op vrijdag 17 februari 2012 10:01 schreef GuRBuH het volgende:

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Ik wil ook, maar heb een beperkt budget. Wat is nou eigenlijk echt de goedkoopste manier om vanuit Nederland daar te komen?

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Op vrijdag 17 februari 2012 14:59 schreef Spezza19 het volgende:

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Ik ga altijd met de auto. 2 personen.
2x 50 euro tanken
39 euro boot (gedeeld door 2 is 19,50)

Hotel is rond de 35 euro per persoon per nacht.

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This is the first part of the interview I conducted with David Sullivan yesterday. There will be around 8 parts in all.

ID: David, you’ve had two years at the club now. If you knew then, what you know now, would you still have done it?
DS: Just. Just, I think. It’s been a harder time than we imagined. Both from a financial point of view and a football point of view. We shouldn’t have got relegated last year with the team we had. That was a major setback from a financial and a football point of view. We never came in thinking we would be relegated, but there was a lot of dissent in the camp, a lot of infighting, and we picked a bad manager [Avram Grant]. Simple as that. On paper you could make a very strong case for him, but I don’t want to say any more because I think it’s wrong to keep hitting somebody over the head. We are as much to blame as the manager.

ID: How near was he to going in the January 2010 transfer window?
DS: It’s very hard to talk about third parties, but we were very close to having another manager come, who I can’t name for obvious reasons. We had 25 hours of meetings with that manager. Twenty-five hours! At every meeting, that manager said to us: “I will be the next manager of West Ham United”. And we kept saying: “When?” Had he come, we would have changed manager. The problem came when he finally said he wasn’t going to come until the summer, and only if we stayed up. At that point, we thought, probably wrongly, it was too late to bring somebody else in. The obvious alternative was Sam at the point, but I think that would have been unacceptable to the supporters last January. Whilst it was acceptable in May, Sam wasn’t the first choice in January. He was the backup choice. David [Gold] would have changed for the first choice manager, but he was unhappy to change for the second choice manager, and I didn’t feel strong enough to have a row about it. It was a very marginal decision. Whether Sam would have kept us up, who knows? To me there were enough good players to keep us up. Just with Demba Ba and Scott Parker – those two alone should have kept us up.

ID: But Avram didn’t even play Demba Ba all the time, did he? A lot of us couldn’t understand that.
DS: He wasn’t fit when he arrived. He came on against Birmingham and hit the post in his first 20 minutes. But then Scott got injured at a vital time. With 8 games to go, I think we had 32 points off 30 games. We got 1 point from the last 8 games. And that’s when Scott got injured.

ID: When did it dawn on you that it wasn’t going to work and that we would be relegated?
DS: Before the Wigan game. And then at half time, I thought, wow, maybe I’m wrong. Because I thought we could beat Sunderland the next week and that could be enough. But we couldn’t defend, you see. Under Avram, we couldn’t defend, and that was our problem. It wasn’t a problem scoring any, we just couldn’t defend. But I suppose in all honesty I thought we were going down over the last 5 or 6 games. In January we had a little run, and that made us think perhaps we should hang on to the summer. Whatever happened we would have changed manager in the summer. We got lucky at Fulham. We got annihilated and went in 2-0 up at half time. It was like a real fluke performance. We won that game and picked up points here and there.

ID: You talked about dissent. Was that between the players and the manager or within the squad.
DS: I’m on the outside looking in, so I really don’t know, but I think there was a foreign group and an English group. I think the English group were plotting against the manager. Everything was wrong at the club last year and by way of contrast, everything is right this year. Everyone’s together.

ID: Is that Sam Allardyce’s influence pure and simple, or are there other factors?
DS: Several disruptive players have left and I think Sam is a different breed of manager. He wouldn’t have stood for it. Had he come in last January I’m not saying we would have stayed up, but I think there’s a greater likelihood we would have stayed up. But as I say, I don’t think it would have been acceptable to the supporters then. It’s been very costly from a football and a financial point of view being relegated and we have lost key players. Scott Parker just didn’t want to stay. Demba Ba had a get out if we were relegated.

ID: How did that work? Did we pay money to Hoffenheim?
DS: I’ll tell you exactly what happened. We wanted to loan him, but Hoffenheim said they wouldn’t loan him as they could get 6 million euros for him from Stoke. He then failed the medical at Stoke. I went back and asked to loan him again. Again they said no, but they would sell him to us. So we paid 500,000 euros down, which was almost like a loan fee, and then we’d pay 5 ½ million euros starting the next season depending on how many games he played – one level of payment in the Championship, one level of payment on the Premier League. I’ll have to make the figures up because I can’t remember, but something like 25,000 euros a game in the Premier League and 10,000 euros in the Championship. Demba Ba signed a three and a half year contract with us. We had a deal where his salary would be halved if we were relegated. He said, “Well on that basis, I have got to be allowed to walk if we get relegated”. What we should have said in retrospect – but none of us thought he would score so many goals – is that we’d be happy to give him £40 grand a week in the Championship. In the end I offered him £45 grand a week to stay but he wouldn’t take it. What we should have said was that if we don’t halve your salary, you haven’t got a get-out. The failure to put that one line in the contract cost us very, very dearly. As I say, he was on £35 grand a week and I offered him £45 grand a week to stay, but he went to Newcastle. His agent got £2 million to take him to Newcastle.

ID: So do Newcastle now have to pay to Hoffenheim the money you would have had to pay?
DS: No. That’s why Newcastle could always outbid us. It was our deal with Hoffenheim.

ID: So Hoffenheim got stuffed, then.
DS: Yup, they got half a million for him. This didn’t work for anyone except Demba Ba… and Newcastle. I’m told he’s got a £7 million get-out at Newcastle and he gets half the money over that. They keep denying it but I think you’ll see in the summer he will leave Newcastle or he’ll get a monstrous rise to stay there. If they get about four million, half will go to him, so if they sell him for £7 million they’ll only net about three because they paid his agent £2 million to get him out of here. Getting £3 million is not bad, but for a player of his quality it’s not fantastic. It’s one of those mistakes that happen, but it’s probably one of the worst mistakes I have ever made in my life. It just didn’t enter our heads. it didn’t enter anybody’s head that he’d score enough goals that we’d want to give him £40k a week and his old club £15/20k an appearance and we’d still be relegated. In reality that’s exactly what happened. The agent just threw it in at the last minute. He said “Obviously if his salary is cut by 50% you’ve got to let him walk”. We thought, OK, if we get relegated, do we really want a £40k a week striker in the Championship? Well, we would have because he was devastating. If he was with us now and his knee had held up, because remember, he did have a very very bad knee, I think we’d be 15 points clear, I really do. He’d be cutting through those defences. You live and you learn.

ID: You can say that again.

In part two… How we came to saign Ravel Morrison, and how Matthew Upson let us down.

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Op vrijdag 17 februari 2012 10:01 schreef GuRBuH het volgende:

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Ik wil ook, maar heb een beperkt budget. Wat is nou eigenlijk echt de goedkoopste manier om vanuit Nederland daar te komen?