Just like this summer, when West Ham United replaced the likes of Emerson Palmieri and Michail Antonio with El Hadji Malick Diouf and Callum Wilson, a former Premier League stalwart knew the writing was on the wall once Slaven Bilic signed Dimitri Payet.
Sam Allardyce pulled off a club-record £10.75 million deal during the summer of 2012.
But while another of that window’s signings, Stuart Downing, would be a man revived once Allardyce switched to a diamond formation, an old-school, chalk-booted winger like Matt Jarvis found that new system to be his downfall.
Former England international Jarvis produced the most accurate crosses of any player in Europe’s top five leagues during his final season at Wolves and also his first with West Ham United. He would start only four Premier League matches in the 2014/15 campaign, though, once Allardyce shifted formations, went away from wingers, and re-packaged Downing as a roving number ten.
Jarvis reflects fondly on his time with Allardyce, as well as with his successor Slaven Bilic.
However, once it became clear that Bilic was sticking with ‘Big Sam’s’ formation, all the while bringing two natural-born attacking midfielders to the club in Dimitri Payet and Manuel Lanzini, Jarvis knew that the writing was on the wall.
Photo by AMA/Corbis via Getty ImagesMatt Jarvis explains why he left West Ham United for Norwich City
Jarvis would end up joining Norwich City for a cut-price fee of £2.5 million, after joining the Canaries on an initial loan deal in 2015.
“With Sam, he sort of broke it down so you knew what you had to do, your role in the team. Slaven, I only played a short spell with but, again, I really enjoyed his training sessions,” Jarvis says. “I really enjoyed his methods and I liked him as a person.
“The only reason that I left was because Sam had changed the system in the previous year. He decided not to play with wingers. He went with a diamond in midfield, so I didn’t feature as much as I wanted.
“I wasn’t ever going to be one of those players who would sit there and not play, and pick up whatever [in terms of wages]. I wanted to play. I couldn’t think of anything worse than training and not being able to play on the weekend.
“Do I regret it? No, not at all. Everything happens for a reason. I went because I wanted to go and play some football. That is the opportunity I got with Norwich.”
Jarvis pinpoints the signings of Dimitri Payet and Manuel Lanzini
Jarvis did find the time to play five European matches before moving to Carrow Road on deadline day. He even produced a pair of assists during the 4-0 aggregate victory over Andorran outfit FC Lusitanos in the Europa League qualifiers.
“I really enjoyed Slaven,” adds Jarvis, who was starting to slip down the pecking order by the time that infamous play-off defeat by Astra Giurgiu rolled around. “I played all the Europa League games throughout the summer, the qualifying, and it was fantastic.
“I was thinking, ‘well, next season I will try and break in’, because you never know what is going to happen.
‘We were going through a spell when we weren’t winning and I was thinking, ‘[Allardyce] could try and change the formation again and I could be back in. When Slaven came in, I didn’t really have any intention to leave at that point.
“I was playing in all the Europa League games, and I actually featured in every single game at the start of the season. But I didn’t start any [games]. I played the last half hour, 25 minutes.
“At that point, they had signed Dimitri Payet and Manuel Lanzini.”
Slaven Bilic wanted the former England ace to stay at West Ham
Jarvis admits that Bilic had hoped to keep him in East London. However, the player himself was not quite so keen on the idea of continuing his streak of cameo appearances off the substitute’s bench.
“Slaven didn’t want me to go. We had a very good relationship. He was like, ‘I don’t want you to go but I can understand. I can’t tell you you are going to start every game, but you have featured in every single game’.
“Just, in the back of my mind [I knew I had to go].
“It was two hours before the window closed, I got the call. It was quite last-minute. I had that lingering thought where I didn’t like not playing and I couldn’t sit on the bench and play a bit-part [role].
“I just wanted to play.”