It’s been a great summer for West Ham in many ways. It’s also been a terrible one in some other, equally important ways.
Whilst the summer signings and move to the newly-roofed London Olympic Stadium have caught the imagination, it’s fair to say that the injury news that is fed to manager Slaven Bilic on a daily basis has made for sorry reading for West Ham fans over the past few months.
Signing after signing has joined the club only to succumb to injury weeks later. Even those not recently signed have fallen to spots on the injury list – it seems the curse isn’t limited to those for whom the Hammers shelled out a record fee.
And although those signings have arrived and things will surely begin to look up once the injury list dies down, Slaven Bilic may look at his squad and see a few names in there he wishes he’d been able to offload instead of adding dead weight to the team. And that’s despite the injuries!
We’ve teamed up with 7 Of The Best to bring you a footballing treat for the season. It’s free to play and the best team each week wins £1,500, as well as monthly prize of £4,000 for the best individual. Want to win bigger? Nab yourself a whopping £500k if you get all seven of your selections correct for seven consecutive weeks.
So in the 7 Of The Best spirit, here are seven West Ham players Slaven Bilic wishes he could have cashed-in on!
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Andy Carroll
It was worrying for Andy Carroll the other week when he got injured yet again, but probably even more worrying when he heard his manager tell the press that he ‘can’t count’ on the English striker.
If that’s the case, though, perhaps it would make sense not to have him at the club. Although Carroll is a different option for the Hammers, he’s only ever an option if he’s fit.
And by the sounds of it, the manager doesn’t think that’s going to happen enough over the next few months.
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Diafra Sakho
Diafra Sakho looked set to be on his way to West Bromwich Albion for £15m this summer before the deal was scuppered due to the player’s back injury.
How the Hammers would have wished the deal had gone through, though. Sakho isn’t a player that West Ham seemed to want, he’s surrounded in the squad by better – not to mention bigger named – forwards, and to sell him for £15m would surely have been one of the deals of the summer.
Only behind receiving £10m for James Tomkins!
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Enner Valencia
West Ham did manage to get rid of Enner Valencia this summer, but surely they’d have wanted to recoup some cash for the out of favour Ecuadorian.
Valencia’s West Ham stay was full of promise undelivered, and whilst this could have been his season, the reality is probably more that he would have been surplus to requirements given the attacking quality available in the squad. If he’s back next season, he’ll surely face the same problem.
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Pedro Obiang
Not one of the more glamorous names in West Ham United’s team these days, Obiang is finding the hard way that the Hammers mean business towards the top of the Premier League these days.
He’s the kind of player who would fit perfectly well in a mid-table club, but if West Ham are going to compete with the bigger boys, they may need to do better than that!
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Dimitri Payet
Controversial addition klaxon alert!
Would West Ham have been better getting rid of their talisman in the summer? Who knows what sort of season Dimitri Payet will have next season, but what we do know is that after a wonderful season bringing West Ham into Europe (albeit briefly) and helping his country reach the European Championships final on home soil, Dimitri Payet was hot property this summer.
Given his age – he’ll be 30 by the end of the season – it might have been time to cash in on the Frenchman for a bucket-load of cash and buying a new top class creator instead.
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Darren Randolph
Darren Randolph’s performances for Ireland over the past few seasons have shown that he is really a very good goalkeeper.
The Irish international is, however, kept out of the West Ham United starting XI by Adrian who continues to perform brilliantly at club level, and was even recently called up to the Spain squad.
Perhaps the Hammers will need to let Randolph leave the club in search of first team football very soon, and it’s usually easier to find a decent back-up keeper in the summer than it is in January.
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Reece Oxford
Is Reece Oxford the man to organise West Ham’s defence for the next decade? It’s possible. But then again, Oxford has been hyped massively over the past year or so.
He’s a hot prospect, there’s no doubt, but there are plenty around West Ham who feel that Oxford could be surpassed by another academy graduate and first-name compatriot Reece Burke – currently on loan at Wigan.
Burke spent last season on loan at Bradford where he won seven end of season awards, so it might soon be time to let Oxford go off to a big club who will pay over the odds and then slyly reveal that Burke is the better Reece!
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