It was four, it should have been six, it could have been 10. West Ham United have hardly prospered since moving to the London Stadium but, like the thrashing by Arsenal last season or the Friday night thumping by Brighton last month, this was a defeat that will linger like a fish under the floorboards. It truly stank.
Slaven Bilic will face questions about his future as manager after this result and rightly so. He has faced such questions before in his two‑and‑a‑half‑year tenure and survived but the naivety, the disorganisation and, by the end, a sheer lack of application suggests that something different needs to be done if this club are to achieve anything near to what they should be capable of on paper.
Before the game Bilic was confident. He knew it was a tough assignment to face Liverpool but defend stoutly and they would have a chance, he said.
Jürgen Klopp’s team committed so many men to attack there would always be opportunities. Manage the transition, occupy the right positions and they could exploit the vulnerability.
This might have been an insight drawn from Bilic’s last chastening result against the Reds: a 4-0 reverse in May when Liverpool dominated the ball and were 3-0 up by the hour mark. If that were the conclusion, however, it was at the very least incomplete. Liverpool were two up in half an hour this time and their opening goal came from a counterattack. What’s more, a counterattack from a West Ham corner.
A corner, for those new to the game, is a moment in a match where play stops and both teams assume predetermined positions. The arrangement West Ham opted for, on their first corner of the game, was one that left only Aaron Cresswell preventing two of the fastest players in the league from a clear run on his goal. Suffice to say once Liverpool cleared the ball to Sadio Mané on the edge of the penalty area, a goal was pretty much guaranteed and, roughly six seconds later, Mo Salah calmly delivered with a cool finish under the England goalkeeper Joe Hart.
That goal put paid to any gameplan of containment but within another few seconds any other result appeared out of reach. On first inspection Liverpool’s second goal had an air of good fortune about it: a corner bounced through the box, came off Mark Noble and was then tucked in by Joël Matip. But the ball hit Noble because he lost his man, Mané, whose run distracted the defence enough for the ball to get past the first post. Noble, who had half-followed in, was therefore facing his own goal when it clanged off him. Hart made a save but rather than trying to turn the ball round the post he pushed it forward, straight to the waiting Matip. These were small details but they mattered.
Having opted for a back five of late, Bilic ditched his system at half-time in order to accommodate the Hammers’ lumbering totem Andy Carroll. In a way, the change conjured a goal as André Ayew, a striker in the first half, delivered a swirling cross from the right wing that Manuel Lanzini managed to take on his chest and loop excellently over Simon Mignolet. But barely was the ball back on the centre spot than Liverpool were running right through a team now light in the middle of the park to score their third.
Yes, Liverpool are a team filled with attacking talent, coached by a manager who puts the emphasis on enabling them. But West Ham were hardly a team of callow youths. The average age of the starting XI was 27 and nine of them were internationals. The club spent £40m in the summer transfer window and £75m in the year before that. There are really no excuses for a team that well qualified to be as badly organised and as ineffective as they were in front of more than 56,000 supporters. The irony is that, in a league that is richer than any in history, they are hardly alone.