Moving home and moving leagues

I’ve been missing in action of late – stranded in some unknown corner of the blogosphere with no way of knowing how to get home.

The stress of moving home and following a team embroiled in a relegation battle is the admittedly weak excuse I will use for the lack of column inches produced for CBM in recent weeks.

If the truth be told, I should have seen it coming. We are now in what is officially know as the “business end” of the season – having apparently sailed through the “charity beginning” and “public sector middle” to get here – so given West Ham’s traumatic season so far, I should have predicted that more drama and stress was afoot.

In some ways, moving home and negotiating your way through the business end of the season are very similar. You know that you should really be excited, but all you can see are numerous obstacles preventing you from completing your task and ultimately, you just want it to all be over one way or another.

Having finally unpacked the last of what seemed like 250 bags and boxes of possessions, I can now turn my full attention to tearing my hair out at West Ham’s so far impotent attempts to stay in the Premier League.

Our recent 3-1 home defeat was “earned” thanks to as bad a performance as I can remember: not just from West Ham, but of any team, of any age, competing in any sport. As we trudged out of the ground on that cold Tuesday evening, many of us were of the opinion that the players must be actively trying to get us relegated. That was genuinely the most rational of explanations we could come up with.

But just as families sat down to celebrate Easter last weekend, West Ham finally started fighting fro their Premier League lives. The point achieved at Everton on Sunday afternoon was done so with the kind of battling display that is usually only ever produced by one man in a claret and blue shirt – Scott Parker.

Unfortunately, Parker’s battling qualities saw him pick up a tenth booking of the season, and as a result he will now miss two of our five remaining games. So we head into the business end of the season with our best account executive out of the office, and unable to attend important meetings with the Sunderland and Liverpool branches.

Even after Sunday’s performance has offered us a glimmer of hope, I still feel like I just want it all to be over now – even if that means being relegated. I’m basically not comfortable with West Ham being involved in games where the stakes are high, or in fact, anywhere above low-to-medium. I’d much rather these high pressure games be the sole preserve of the like of Manchester United, Chelsea and those other strange clubs that start the season genuinely expecting to win something.

I always feel West Ham are much more at home just for want of a better phrase, mucking about. At school, we would be the bright kid who talks too much. The one who produces one beautifully written essay out of four and could be in the top set if he applied himself a little better.

Unfortunately, it now looks like every one of our five remaining games will be tight, tense affairs. This weekend, West Ham fans will face the depressing prospect of paying close attention to the result of a fixture between Hull City and Burnley. Ten years ago, if someone had told me the result of such a game could affect West Ham’s league position, I would have assumed that some awful financial scandal had seen us demoted two divisions. Actually, Sheffield United are probably still campaigning for that to happen.

But West Ham’s saving grace is that Hull and Burnley are so bad that we will probably only need to avoid defeat in three of the five games to stay up. In fact, Hull and Burnley’s combined ineptitude will probably seem them both somehow emerge from Saturday’s game with no points.

If West Ham play anything like they did against Wolves a couple of weeks ago, we may need that to actually happen. And if it does? Well, it will at least all be over and I can look forward to away trips to Blackpool and Scunthorpe.