The last few weeks of West Ham’s season have been rather like the excavation of an archaeological site, Declan Rice and David Moyes chiselling away at the layers to gradually uncover the hallmarks of a forgotten tribe.
First came glimpses of the old West Ham resilience in defence, then the counter-attacking thrust on which the success of the last two seasons has relied, and at Bournemouth on Sunday, another lost relic of Moyes’s peak Irons Age emerged: a set-piece threat to rival any in the league.
Between the start of the 2020/21 season and the end of last term, West Ham scored 30 Premier League goals from set-pieces, fewer only than Manchester City and Liverpool.
This season so far, however, the Hammers are only 13th in the same ranking, having scored just eight set-piece goals, two of which came at in the 4-0 win at the Vitality this weekend.
“We’ve been really disappointed with our set-pieces all season,” Moyes said yesterday. “We’ve not scored as many, we’ve not been as big a threat. It’s not something we’re jumping about because we think we’ve done a great job on it this year - we’ve not.”
The Scot cited Craig Dawson’s limited involvement in the first half of the season and then January sale to Wolves as part of the decline, while Aaron Cresswell’s return to the team in recent weeks has certainly helped, the full-back’s delivery not only a fine weapon but also freeing up Rice to attack the box, as he did when thrashing home against the Cherries.
Ahead of the meeting with Liverpool at the London Stadium - where a victory would surely all-but secure the club’s Premier League survival - the return of that prowess seems particularly timely, with Jurgen Klopp’s side having been undone twice by long throw-ins in their 3-2 win over Nottingham Forest on Saturday.
The caveat to that supposed weakness is that the Reds also scored all three of their goals from set-pieces and West Ham must be at their best to preserve their record as the division’s most defensively sound set-piece side, their three goals conceded in 31 games a remarkable statistic for a side that has spent most of the year battling relegation.
Moyes has no new injury concerns following Sunday’s game and could stick with an unchanged lineup, with Gianluca Scamacca the only long-term absentee.
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