West Ham 3 Notts Forest 2:WEST HAM United have bucked a trend at last. Comebacks have shattered them over the past week, Everton and Birmingham City leaving the Londoners bottom of the Premier League and out of the League Cup just as Wembley came into view. Yet this was a match in which they demonstrated their own powers of recovery.
There were periods here when the top-flight team were so befuddled by Nottingham Forest’s slick and breathless approach that the mood in the stands teetered on a return to the mutinous. The visitors, so resurgent in the Championship, might have led at the interval had Victor Obinna’s opportunism not clawed the home team back into the tie. West Ham’s bite and relative solidity thereafter still felt vaguely unfamiliar but it did restore some sense of order after yet another trying week.
A fifth-round tie against Burnley awaits, with any distraction from Premier League struggles still welcome. Another cup run could rub off on West Ham’s league form. Obinna will hope as much, given five of his six goals for the club to date have come in the cups. His hat-trick here was timely, given the signing of Demba Ba from Hoffenheim and the arrival of Tottenham Hotspur’s Robbie Keane on loan, the Nigerian offering a reminder of his qualities on his first appearance since he was sent off in the first leg of the League Cup semi-final.
The striker’s goals were well taken. A predatory finish from Mark Noble’s mis-hit shot early on set a tone that West Ham could not maintain, until the Nigerian rasped in a staggering cross-shot from near the right touchline and over a startled Lee Camp, three minutes from the break. Obinna’s glance up at goal suggested that his effort was intentional.
His second-half penalty, converted after Joel Lynch’s tug on Winston Reid, was confident enough and the momentum was all West Ham’s through that second period. The transformation was staggering.
West Ham were unrecognisable after the break, their urgency restored and the visitors’ rhythm disturbed. By the end, even with Garath McCleary scuffing wide in stoppage time, West Ham even felt comfortable. Even so, elimination from the FA Cup, and a first defeat since November, was hard on a Forest side whose rat-a-tat football before the interval fromtheir front line panicking West Ham on every dart into enemy territory.
Their approach was summed up by David McGoldrick’s blind reverse pass into Dele Adebola’s path for the striker to prod in his first goal of the season. Lewis McGugan and Radoslaw Majewski, gliding into pockets of space vacated by West Ham’s defence, might have put the visitors ahead. McGoldrick did that after Rob Green had palmed up Frederic Piquionne’s inadvertent near-post header, the Forest midfielder converting from virtually on the goal-line.
Had Forest maintained that lead until the interval then the outcome might have been different but Obinna’s equaliser wrested back momentum. Instead it was Camp, excellent in repelling Piquionne twice and Freddie Sears, who kept Forest afloat.
