West Ham United had played 29 Premier League games but just ten of them hadn’t resulted in a defeat.
To say it had been an up-and-down season would be wildly off the mark – there were no ups to speak of – but this was a season where the Hammers had spent a week in both first and last positions in the table. After beating Charlton and drawing with Watford in the first two games of the season, West Ham topped the Premier League. But it was all downhill from there, and they’d win just four more games before mid-March. A 6-0 defeat away to Reading served as a particular low.
Then one of the summer signings changed the Hammers’ fortunes.
Over a decade on from that 2006/07 season, and West Ham and Manchester United will meet on the first weekend of the Premier League season, and once again it will be a match involving a striker both sets of fans can bond over.
If Javier Hernandez is half the player for West Ham that Carlos Tevez proved to be in his short time at the club, completely changing the trajectory of the team’s season, then he’ll probably lead the Hammers to one of their most successful Premier League campaigns. It shouldn’t be forgotten that Tevez played in a West Ham side which included Jonathan Spector and Nigel Quashie. Hernandez, meanwhile, will join a side with Joe Hart, Andre Ayew and Manuel Lanzini. It’s a different world.
Back in 2006, though, West Ham signed Tevez and Javier Mascherano in one of English football’s strangest transfers, possibly of all-time. Until Ruben Neves – the Champions League’s youngest-ever captain at the age of 18 – joined Wolves this summer, there weren’t many to rival it for oddness. Perhaps what made the Tevez and Mascherano deals stranger, however, was the third-party ownership issues it raised.
But when Tevez was finally transferred, he didn’t settle straight away into life in Upton Park.
Because of events that would take place later in the season, Sheffield United became the most vocal and aggrieved critics of the Premier League’s decision to allow West Ham to sign the Argentinian duo in the first place Both were clearly two of world football’s brightest young talents at the time, and both were signed in reasonably suspicious circumstances. But it was during a game against the Bramall Lane side in November – one of the side’s few pre-Christmas victories – which proved to be controversial long before relegation even entered into the mind.
After being substituted, Tevez stormed off, throwing a tantrum and leaving the ground. He received a fine from his manager and his teammates, but although the Hammers won the game on the day, you get the feeling that if Sheffield United ended the season incensed that West Ham had somehow cheated them out of their Premier League status, they were more than likely laughing at the mess the East London club had managed to get themselves into on that day in November.
They were in an even bigger mess in March when, after three successive wins – the club’s first back-to-back victories since late October and early November – Sheffield United hosted West Ham at Bramall Lane and won 3-0. A 4-1 defeat to Chelsea followed, and they looked to be heading for the drop. Once again, the Blades faced West Ham and surely weren’t overly concerned about the Irons’ transfer dealings when they were celebrating victory and possible survival.
It was only on the last day of the season, West Ham managed to escape. A Tevez-inspired side won three more games on the spin to put their survival in their own hands, but it was perhaps the most fearsome Premier League trip that awaited them – an away fixture at Old Trafford.
That was the game which really announced to English football that Tevez was more than just a good player – he was a talismanic player and a man for the big occasion. A man who could take on the biggest and the best and win – something that, for such a small, but hard-working player was the backbone to his game.
That graft is actually shown in the goal he scored to win the game for West Ham that day – his final appearance in a Hammers shirt.
After Tevez had brought the ball down on his chest and held off challenges from two Manchester United players, the Argentine played a quick one-two with his strike partner Bobby Zamora. But it was Tevez’s quick-wittedness and his low-centre of gravity that made the goal – he was then able to react to a deflection off the final United defender before slotting an impressively cool finish below the onrushing Edwin Van der Sar.
It was a goal that launched a thousand protests, from Sheffield United, who were eventually relegated after defeat to Wigan – and would have been down even if Tevez hadn’t scored – but from others around the footballing world, too.
Just how would West Ham United have managed to persuade two promising Argentinian talents to join their club if it weren’t for the fact that their representatives in a murky world of third-party ownership, Kia Joorabchian, had wanted to buy the East Londoners?
This week, though, as West Ham travel to Old Trafford once again, they’ll do so as a much different club and in a much different place. A player of Tevez’s ability wouldn’t look out of place at the modern club and their iconic new stadium, and with former United striker Hernandez, the Hammers might just have a striker who can score the sort of important goals that Tevez did in his short time at the club.
