Manchester U 3 West Ham 0:BEFORE THE end, even the West Ham players felt obliged to applaud. Nemanja Vidic won one tackle so cleanly that when Carlton Cole picked himself up, shaking his head, puffing out his cheeks, there was a moment you do not often see in a football match: he started to clap.
Cole is a better than average striker, not particularly refined but a decent player all the same, and yet in that moment he seemed almost in awe of his opponent.
At the other end of the ground, the away fans had resorted to gallows humour. “Let’s pretend we’ve scored a goal,” they sang over and again, followed by a faux celebration every time.
It was a peculiar sight, but this is what it has come to for West Ham. They have played three games, conceded nine goals and taken zero points. Their next assignment is against Chelsea and, as one of only two sides in the country to lose every match so far (the other being Stoke City), it is probably no surprise their supporters have started creating their own entertainment.
Avram Grant, their manager, has signed six players but had none of them in his starting line-up for this defeat. He has played a different right-back in every match – Winston Reid, Julien Faubert and Jonathan Spector – and on Saturday he experimented with Luis Boa Morte, a wide player, in central midfield.
Grant’s body language was defensive. “It’s still the beginning of the season, we don’t want to make conclusions after two or three weeks. We need to wait and then, after 10 or 15 games, we’ll know what the situation is.”
Except it looks like they need major restoration work rather than just fine-tuning. Robbie Keane, available from Tottenham Hotspur, is one target.
“I hope we can get him, but I don’t know,” Grant said. “There’s the financial situation we need to think about here. The club has big, big debts, but he’s a player I would like to get, of course.”
Others, though, have also been alerted to Keane’s availability, including Newcastle United and Aston Villa.
In fairness, West Ham began the game with an assuredness that might not have been anticipated, but as soon as the opening goal went in they scarcely bothered with the pretence of thinking they could win. Grant felt the penalty was unjust, although he stopped short of accusing Ryan Giggs of diving, which was just as well because his irritation should have been directed towards Spector, the guilty defender. The American was an obliging opponent, his mistimed challenge enabling Wayne Rooney to end his 150-day run without scoring a goal.
Rooney, in the words of Alex Ferguson’s assistant Mike Phelan, had “come back to us a little bit dishevelled from his England exploits (at the World Cup)”. In truth, he is still not the vibrant player we saw last season.
“He is not 100 per cent yet,” Phelan said. “He is still short on certain aspects of his game. That will come, but he has got a couple of games with his national team coming up now and that will possibly help him. He has got a penalty and stuck it away and hopefully now he can relax, enjoy his football and carry on from where he left off.”
There was plenty of hard running from Rooney, and a deft pass into the path of Nani in the build-up to a lovely second goal. Otherwise, though, the renascent Dimitar Berbatov was the most effective United forward, and he capped it with a wonderful volley to make it 3-0.
Ferguson singled out Berbatov’s performance, but the peculiar thing is that for all the good work of United’s front two, it mostly involves individual moments of excellence, or linking well with other players. There are surprisingly few occasions when they combine with one another. Their partnership is still to click.
Even so, both players still had the ability to make a decisive contribution and, in Rooney’s case, his confidence should be returning.
