West Ham United could regret the release of Andriy Yarmolenko
West Ham United announced their 2022 retained list on Friday (27 May) and there were no major surprises in terms of players leaving this summer.
We all knew that Mark Noble was going to hang up his boots and given how little Ryan Fredericks and David Martin have played this year, their presence in the quartet of leavers was to be expected too.
The one name that might raise an eyebrow though is Andriy Yarmolenko, even though we all knew of his exit as well, because he did play a fair bit towards the end of the season.
The Ukrainian international was, admittedly, just a substitute for the majority of our most important games and would only start the matches where David Moyes was resting his key players for a push at the Europa League.
But in that time, he scored a couple of very crucial goals for our season and was always available as a threat to bring on late into games even when the main men were ahead of him in the queue.
He was the man to score the extra-time goal at home to Sevilla in the Europa League round of 16that sent us through to the quarter-finals and he then followed that up with a deadlock-breaking strike against Aston Villa the following weekend.
The significance of those goals may have gone over the heads of Moyes and the Hammers’ board because finding someone who can produce that moment of magic when it is needed most is a very hard task to achieve.
Yarmolenko could easily come back to haunt us in the future and if we start to suffer injuries in attack next season, Moyes will be wishing he had given him at least one more year at the London Stadium.
In other West Ham news, one of our key players is not going anywhere this summer as the club will reject any approach for him.
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