Not like this… not like this.
Depending on how Tuesday night pans out at Stamford Bridge, with West Ham now in the position of needing a huge favour from one London rival at the expense of another, the Hammers may have kicked their last meaningful ball in anger in this relegation fight.
If, indeed, it is this catastrof*ck of a 3-1 defeat at Newcastle that relegates them it will be a tough pill to swallow. There is no easy or good way for a club of West Ham’s size to go down.
Once your Leedses and Forests had eased clear and it became apparent we were dealing with a two-horse race between big London clubs, there was only a brutal outcome or an even more brutal outcome. One would relegate the other and it would become A Moment in what has at times been a slightly one-sided but always nevertheless potent rivalry.
And it now very much looks like it will be West Ham who go, and it will be in a very bad way if so.
Let’s deal with the facts. West Ham’s defeat here leaves them two points adrift of Spurs and with only three points of their own left to fight for against Leeds on the final.
Spurs go to Chelsea and host Everton knowing that a vastly superior goal difference means a single point in either game will suffice. And that’s assuming West Ham manage to take care of their own business against a teak-tough and in-form team on the final day.
The even shorter version: all three remaining matches that matter in the relegation fight now have to go decisively West Ham’s way.
Now we are absolutely not about to rule out Spurs going full Spurs and West Ham somehow getting out of this. It is the history of the etc. and so forth.
But it is also worth looking more closely at the other three teams who still have potential roles to play in this story. Spurs need one point from two games against teams currently 16th and 20th in the form table; West Ham need, just for starters, three points from one game against the team in second.
West Ham should at least be able to rely on Chelsea being bang up for the chance to inflict more misery on Spurs, their favourite punching-bag. But this is no normal Chelsea, they have been abysmal in the Premier League for two months now, and will come into this game against a rested if still ruinously depleted Spurs just three days after giving their all to no avail against Man City in the FA Cup final.
Everton, for their part, have seen European ambitions dwindle to almost nothing on their own limp run to the finish line.
The Toffees are without a win in their last six games – and the last win they did get doesn’t even give Hammers much reason for hope because it was against Chelsea in the early days of their current seven-match winless Premier League run.
Dr Tottenham has performed many, many miracles before, but surely not even such an esteemed medic can be relied on here. West Ham’s final opponents Leeds, meanwhile, haven’t lost since the first week of March and have pocketed 16 points from their last eight games (four wins, four draws) to saunter well clear of trouble.
It seems fair to caveat things here with a broad suggestion that most of the Premier League would rather Spurs went down than West Ham did, but there’s only so much help they can offer. Based on this evidence, even if Chelsea and Everton – and Leeds – all do their very best to help West Ham out they might not be able to help themselves.
That’s what will really sting. If this really was the end as it very likely is, it is the most infuriatingly self-inflicted wound. West Ham spent their Sunday evening in Newcastle furiously hammering nails into their own coffin, stopping occasionally only to miss altogether and whack their own thumb.
The errors came thick and fast. Nuno Espirito Santo got his team selection badly wrong. We could just about understand why he wanted to stick with the back three after the huge and admirable if ultimately futile effort against Arsenal last week, but it was a big gamble to stick with it against such a very different team in such a very different mood.
Even if West Ham had started less abysmally than they did, they didn’t have the prospect they had last week of knowing that keeping the game tight and in the balance would cause nerves to creep into their opponent.
It was just a completely different occasion, something more akin to a testimonial as the Newcastle players emerged carrying their children to a ground full of signs bidding a fond farewell to Kieran Trippier ahead of what really should have been a far more difficult evening for a 35-year-old trying to deal with Crysencio Summerville.
But the real head-scratcher came at the sharp point of West Ham’s attack, where Taty Castellanos made way for Callum Wilson.
In one baffling wrong move, Nuno contrived to weaken both his starting XI and bench given Taty’s key role in the dramatic new-year improvement that gave West Ham any hope at all in this fight, and Wilson’s previous penchant for vital late goals as a substitute.
Within 20 minutes, the damage was done. Two catastrophic sets of multiple errors too grievous to analyse further handed a grateful Newcastle a 2-0 lead they barely had to work for.
Nick Woltemade and Will Osula accepted the gifts and, sure, Newcastle played a couple of neat little moves to create the goals. But it had the distinct whiff of the pre-season jolly. West Ham were just miles and miles off it in their biggest Premier League game in years.
The wrong XI playing the wrong shape in the wrong way, and it may well cost them everything. That Newcastle didn’t even have to be very good to pull them apart should break West Ham hearts.
As should the fact that when Nuno took steps to correct his mistake, the difference was instant. Jean-Clair Todibo was sacrificed to belatedly get Taty on the pitch, and West Ham became an active participant in the game once more.
But an important element of being the 18th-best team in a division is that you can’t really give anyone a 2-0 headstart before turning up. Not even a Newcastle team that p*sses leads away for fun.
There was further cruelty for Nuno, who, with just under half-an-hour to go in a game West Ham had to get something out of for a fight in which goal difference is largely meaningless, decided to go all out.
No criticism here of the decision to bring on Mohamadou Kante and Pablo to switch into something that looked very much like 3-3-4 for the final half hour – it was entirely sh*t or bust time – but giving away a third goal seconds later did rather draw attention to the changes.
That’s not really fair, either, because Nuno’s changes cannot explain how West Ham managed to use their own throw on halfway to not only instantly cede possession but break their own defensive lines so decisively that three Hammers were taken entirely out of the game by it before Osula couldn’t-believe-his-lucked a second goal of the night.
You cannot coach that kind of comical, self-defeating catastrophe. You can strive for another word to describe it all you like; you won’t land on a better one than Spursy. West Ham really might have just Spursed Spurs to safety by being more Spurs even than Spurs. What a way to go.
There was still time for Taty to score an absurd long-range consolation that briefly raised West Ham’s hopes again.
Thanks to that, it may end up that today serves as a microcosm of West Ham’s season as a whole: a miserable series of baffling self-inflicted mistakes, hope and improvement heralded by the introduction of Taty, but alas his eye-catching contributions all proving to be too little, too late.
West Ham need huge favours from elsewhere now, but whether they get them or not they need only look inward to see the source of their travails. This was a dreadful day in a season that has had too many of them and what is now a run of four points in five games since getting an improbable Great Escape into their own hands last month.
