West Ham win at Chelsea will give Pellegrini more time than he deserves

After West Ham’s win at Chelsea on the weekend, the fans seemed to ease off of Pellegrini’s poor recent form in charge. But the players were responsible for the change, and the Wolves game laid Pellegrini’s poor thinking bare.

Often there is unfair blame laid at the feet of the manager. With players paid thousands a day to simply turn up and play a game that so many people love it can seem harsh to blame a man who doesn’t even touch the ball during the game. However, in this case, there are a lot of issues that Pellegrini is refusing to solve. And the Chelsea win only papered over the cracks.

If you had the misfortune of watching the match against Wolves, you will have seen West Ham’s midfield pass the ball slowly sideways across the halfway line, occasionally look up to see Haller standing there surrounded by defenders and try and ping the ball across to him. Then look surprised as Wolves counterattacked with pace and movement and our defence backpedalled for all they were worth. It was a mess.

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Whilst I do think that Haller should be doing more to try and impact the game, we bought him for his performances in Frankfurt. There he played as part of a two-striker system and was heavily supported by attacking midfielders. The game we’re currently trying to play requires him to move out of position a lot, and that’s not his style. We need to be more direct, faster balls to the wingers and attackers. But Pellegrini just won’t change.

Against Chelsea every single player picked up their game and pushed, whilst Chelsea seemed a bit rattled by the game not being as easy as they thought, and managing that kind of side is easy. But when the players aren’t at 100%, the manager has to inspire them or come up with a plan to solve the problems. Last year Pellegrini seemed to have some plans. Now he seems devoid of ideas and there certainly isn’t anything inspiring about his leadership.

Next. Momentum lost as Wolves show us what we're missing. dark

The board would do well to ignore the Chelsea outlier, and look at the fact that over the last 8 games we’ve been the worst side in the Premier League. It extends beyond Fabianski being injured, and all signs point to a driver asleep at the wheel. I only hope we act before we sleep walk into a relegation dogfight towards the end of the season.