West Ham United beat Newcastle United 2-0 on Saturday evening.
West Ham United boss Manuel Pellegrini has told Football.London that he wouldn’t have believed Manuel Lanzini had been out for eight months after seeing him star against Newcastle United.
The Hammers were looking to bounce back from an unlucky 1-0 defeat at Manchester City, and did just that with a fine win over a resurgent Newcastle.
Declan Rice headed home a Robert Snodgrass corner to open the scoring, before Mark Noble scored from the spot to seal a 2-0 win after Javier Hernandez had been fouled.
West Ham are showing some real momentum under Pellegrini now, and they have been given an added boost with the return of playmaker Lanzini.
The Argentinian has been out for eight months having suffered a major knee injury in training for last summer’s World Cup, and has faced a long road back to playing again.
Lanzini has returned as a substitute of late, but made his first start of the season against Newcastle, and looked like he hasn’t missed a beat.
Pellegrini has now admitted that he thinks Lanzini has changed West Ham’s game with his return, and simply would not believe that he has missed eight months having come back in such fine form.
“If you tell me that Lanzini was injured for eight months, you would not believe it,” said Pellegrini. “He is a player that has returned, he is not afraid of playing. When you have such a bad injury maybe you are not so comfortable in the first games, you are worried, you don’t trust too much in yourself to tackle or make good passes.”
“But Manu changed our game, he is a player giving good assistance to the forwards, always receiving the all, always asking for the ball and I don’t remember him losing one pass tonight,” he added.
The next thing for West Ham to tackle is Lanzini’s contract. His current deal expires in just over a year, and at just £35,000-a-week (London Evening Standard), West Ham need to offer him a big pay rise to secure this future this summer.
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