Tomas Soucek’s decline at West Ham United has left Jamie O’Hara baffled, the former Premier League midfielder telling talkSPORT (4th March, 5.30pm) that the Czech Republic giant was one of the division’s best not so long ago.
How times change.
West Ham, during their 2020 to 2021 peak under David Moyes, had a spine made out of pure steel; Angelo Ogbonna, Kurt Zouma, Craig Dawson, Declan Rice, Michail Antonio and Soucek playing the best football of their careers in claret-and-blue.
Flash forward to early-2022, however, and that steel has turned to cardboard. Ogbonna was part of a backline which conceded four goals in a humiliating afternoon at Brighton. Even Rice was a million miles away from his usual standards on the south coast.
Soucek, meanwhile, has been out of sorts for over a year now; a man so often likened to Everton-era Marouane Fellaini due to his power, presence and goal-threat from central midfield now more closely resembling the Manchester United version.
Soucek struggles as West Ham suffer Brighton hammering
“What has happened to him?,” O’Hara asks, taken by surprise as Soucek was singled out for criticism by an irate West Ham supporter on talkSPORT’s Game Day phone-in show.
“I watched him last season. Declan Rice and Soucek, we were talking about those two being the best midfielders in the league at one point.
“How has he fallen off so badly?”
West Ham remain outside the relegation zone, but only two points off the bottom; that miserable Amex hammering undoing all the good work of last week’s Nottingham Forest thumping at the London Stadium.
Moyes, interestingly, suggests that there are tactical reasons behind Soucek’s dramatic dip. It’s never a great sign, when your manager is admitting that his tactics are having a negative effect on one of your key players.
“We’ve tried to get Declan forward up the pitch in the last year or two. In a way affected Tomas Soucek,” Moyes explains; the Czech scoring just eight goals in his last 83 games.
“Soucek if you look the year before (2021/22) got 10 goals arriving in the box. With (Lucas) Paqueta coming in next to Dec, it means Dec has got to do more of a steady job because Lucas is a midfield player closer to being an attacking one than he is a defensive one.
“We’ve been trying to find ways of scoring goals. Sometimes we’ve said we won’t play Tomas to get a more attacking midfielder in alongside Declan. We’ve been tweaking that.
“We’ve got some results with it but I had brilliant results when I had Tomas and Declan alongside each other as well. But in the first half of the season, we’ve not been able to find the goals.”
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