Last weekend I went to see West Ham at Upton Park play Newcastle, during which we played a frankly boring 0-0 which included little to no clear-cut chances for either side. Our performance was, again, pretty solid defensively, and generally in attack we looked a threat, but at the heart of this poor quality game was our captain Kevin Nolan.
After signing for us last summer for around £4 million from Newcastle, I, similarly to most other Hammers fans, was excited and looking forward to seeing what the attacking midfielder had in store for us and if he could help us achieve promotion. His first year in claret-and-blue was a pleasing one, scoring 12 goals (including an absolute belter against Deby County) and using his fantastic captaincy skills to guide us back to the Premier League. It was a dream buy for the club, and at the start of this season, it looked like he would be continuing his goal-scoring form with 5 goals in the opening 11 games.
However, since then he has only added 2 more to his total and his contributions to the team effort are becoming increasingly limited.
Maybe it's age, maybe it's the increasing quality of the Premiership, but it seems that currently, Nolan can't cope. The so-called 'undroppable' one has played very poorly this year and many fans and calling for him to be dropped. Watching his performance against Newcastle was dire. Apart from a couple of tackles and a shot on target he did nothing. He was constantly missing tackles, losing the ball in possession, giving away the ball with sloppy passes (I doubt he made a completed pass in the entire game) and his old tactic of standing infront of the keeper during corners has now become so ineffective and useless and if anything leaves him in a poor position to head the ball from the corner. I was pleading for him to be subbed off, but instead the likes of Guy Demel and Matt Jarvis (who had had much bigger impacts on the game than he had) were replaced instead.
You could say that he simply had an off game, but this has been happening far too often. He was supposed to be ready and fired up to play his old side, but nothing like that came through at all. He played well against Wigan, but that was probably his only decent performance of 2013. I feel embarrassed that he is our joint-top goalscorer in the league with a woefull 7 goals, and it is likely that this will be his first season in 4 years that he won't make double figures with his number of goals.
And it's not like there isn't anyone else to play in his position. We have many players like Ricardo Vaz Te, Jack Collison, Joe Cole and the returning on-loan Ravel Morrison who could do more than a decent job in Nolan's place. Or we could scrap the attacking-midfielder position completely and give Andy Carroll a partner upfront (such as Carlton Cole, Modibo Maiga, Marouane Chamakh or Vaz Te). There are many options that Sam Allardyce has instead of wasting a valuable starting 11 place on Nolan who is probably there purely based on his captaincy and motivation of the side, which he could do from the bench (as well as the fact that we have the likes of Mark Noble and Winston Reid in our side who have captained successfully before).
In my opinion, Nolan should be dropped. Not sold though, as a return to form for next year could be on the cards, and he may turn out to be a valuable substitution in the future. As I have said, Nolan does bring motivation and a strong captaincy to the table (as well as the odd goal), but apart from that, there really isn't much else that he has to offer at the moment. So Big Sam, please listen, get him to play better football, or don't play him at all.
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