Wet Ham Sandwich (A match thread)

I didn't see "Forest [missed pen]" on the match report.

Good, deserved win. Areola kept Wet Sham in it.
Credit to NES for his team selection.
The right/left centre-back pairing gave us much more balance in possession. That was the best I've seen Murillo play - superb apart from one poor pass (identical to the one Matt Turner made against Spudz which cost us a goal, but Murillo got away with it)
Elanga frustrating as ever. His pace is such a threat and clearly worries the opposition, but he missed three great chances himself and poor decision making denied us another glorious chance for Taiwo.
MGW excellent, but sometimes needs to go for the simple ball, rather than the fancy flick (he gifted possession against Newcastle doing it and twice today). And I don't think he's captain material. He did well to steer Nico away from trouble at one point, but I want him in the ref's ear. Antonio got on the ref early when a decision went against him and then the next three or four decisions went his way.
CHO continues to get better and better with a run of games.
Was a bit puzzled why he put Div wide and Elanga down the middle when big T went off - thought we lost a bit of control at that point, with no focal point.
Special mention though to the ref, who was terrible, for both teams. At least he was consistent in getting things wrong. We have the ball, he stops for a Wet Sham injury and restarts with a drop ball to them. Missed Neco clipping Kudus and just waved play-on, Inconsistent over what merited a yellow card.
As for the 'penalty' - terrible. How on Earth can VAR rule that no foul?
I'd also like to see another angle of the disallowed goal. Yes Yates was offside, but I'd like to see how much he actually impacted the GK because it just looked like a GK error from the normal viewpoint.

Gave him a nudge in the back, it wasn't all that significant and there's a decent argument that the ball would have gone in anyway but I don't really have too many complaints about the decision.

VAR - for big clubs only.

Excellent result. Their keeper is the best I've seen since we came up, they got away with 2.

We were good. I'm a bit more beer infused than normal, but we were good. Murillo is always good. Danilo, Nico and Neco were also particularly good today. Fully deserved, and our keeper was largely bored

Someone on here said last week Murillo couldn’t defend. I’m not sure I’ll ever get over that.

Thankfully the disgusting VAR decision didn’t affect us.

I think Murillo has his weaknesses defensively, most noticeably in the air. It's entirely reasonable to think that he'll continue improving though.

He's immense. Seriously. We will look back in a few years and find it amazing he ever played for us.

He fucked up a couple of passes early on today. Many kids would resort to hoofing after that. He just sorted his range out.

There was a suggestion recently that he wasn't strong. Antonio moved Felipe once. Against murillo he just ended up getting booked for arguing. The blokes a beast

Really? I think it's clear he's an ox. I'm not convinced he's desperately quick, but his positioning is mostly good enough for that to not be too much of an issue.

Did Felipe avoid diving in / charging towards the ball and leaving acres of space behind him? That's always been my criticism of him. Perhaps he's learnt or maybe Wet Ham just weren't good enough to move us around in that way.

Yes he did, and I think it's probably a bit of the latter along with Danilo and Dominguez doing a good job of not getting sucked upfield and leaving space for West Ham to exploit, thus tempting Felipe into rashness.

All I've seen so far are the Sky highlights, in which Tavares seems to have played a significant role in all three of the first half attempts on goal. Can't tell much from 3 mins highlights, but is that representative of his performance?

Also, was Sels solid? An upgrade on Turner and Vlach?

Just in case that's me, that really wasn't what I said or meant.

His positioning is improving game by game, but still needs work, particularly when defending crosses. One v one, it's excellent though.
I think the point was he suffered a little bit of a dip in form and a number of facets of his game still need work, but he was definitely back to his best today.

Tavares had the best game I've seen for us. Can be great moving forwards but still skyed a couple, and gave the ball away a couple of times.

Sels did nothing wrong but wasn't really tested.