Believe it or not, only six of the West Ham United players who started that opening weekend defeat to Sunderland remain at Nuno Espirito Santo’s disposal as Burnley looms on Saturday.
Niclas Fullkrug, Lucas Paqueta, Guido Rodriguez and James Ward-Prowse all departed during the January transfer window. The latter made the switch from East London to Lancashire, though Ward-Prowse is ineligible to face his parent club at Turf Moor.
This, coupled with a busy month of incomings, means the West Ham United side which faces off against Scott Parker’s Burnley outfit in tomorrow’s 3pm kick-off is still getting to know each other.
Just how IMPORTANT is this Burnley match for West Ham? 🫨
The very definition of a ‘six-pointer’
Taty Castellanos, Pablo Felipe, Adama Traore and Axel Disasi were not West Ham players when Tomas Soucek scored a dramatic late winner against the Clarets in November.
Chelsea loanee Disasi could make his debut in place of the suspended Jean-Clair Todibo. And while Nuno accepts West Ham cannot expect Castellanos and Pablo to go hell-for-leather from the first minute to the last, though the mobility and work-rate brought by their two new centre-forwards gives the Hammers a kind of thrust sorely absent when Fullkrug was leading the line.
Scott Parker praises West Ham United as Pablo Felipe and Taty Castellanos make their mark
Nuno admits all his transfer wishes did not come true last month.
But West Ham are already benefitting from the presence of Pablo and Castellanos up top. Disasi should be a big upgrade on Max Kilman, fitness permitting. And, in the roadrunning Traore, Nuno has a very different kind of option on the bench these days.
Speaking at his pre-match press conference on Friday afternoon, Parker acknowledges the impact of those new attackers, brought in for a combined £47 million from Gil Vicente and Lazio respectively.
Photo by Kevin Hodgson/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images
“I think they’ve had a big, big improvement over the last three or four weeks. Obviously, [they have] brought some players in and I think you’ve seen a pick-up in their results, really,” Parker says.
“So yeah, it’s probably a bit of a different side to the one we faced early on in the season, down to personnel.”
Parker hopes to right the wrongs of Burnley’s London Stadium loss
While he has not yet come close to scoring a maiden Premier League goal, Pablo Felipe earned comparisons to namesake Pablo Fornals at Stamford Bridge last weekend. What the 22-year-old may lack in terms of silk or skill, he could make up for in nuisance factor.
If Nuno picks the same XI he selected against Chelsea – albeit with Disasi in for Todibo – that will mean nearly half of the players who started in that 3-2 victory over Burnley three months ago will not feature on the team sheet; Todibo, Kilman, Paqueta, Callum Wilson and Freddie Potts.
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But what do you think?
“It’s going to be a tough game, of course it is,” adds Parker, who won West Ham’s Player of the Year award in three successive seasons at Upton Park between 2009 and 2011.
“You see that in terms of them going away to Chelsea and being two up. I know they lost the game but they had some real good moments. So there’s a challenge there, of course there is. We’ll embrace that.”
“It was definitely [disappointing to lose at the London Stadium in November]. We dominated the game and played really, really well. Then, the game swung a little bit and obviously we come out the wrong side of the result.
“There were some positives from that game. The one [negative] was obviously the result, and then at that moment everything gets a little bit diluted, really. So yeah, we take some positives from that game, and we’re looking forward to this one at the weekend.”
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