WHZ View: Is the London Stadium now finally West Ham’s home?
It takes a long time to make a house a home. All your stuff is there, the same people are there and you have all your memories too. But when you relocate, you just know it isn’t home. It just doesn’t feel right.
West Ham fans know that feeling all too well. It’s hard to describe the feeling but ever since bidding farewell to the Boleyn Ground in May 2016, it’s been uncomfortable. It’s like forcing yourself to love something that you know wasn’t as good as something else.
The 2015/16 season was an unforgettable one. With Slaven Bilic in charge, the Irons finished seventh in the Premier League with a record-breaking 62 points. Dimitri Payet lit up the Premier League and there was that game against Manchester United.
In West Ham’s final match at Upton Park, Diafra Sakho and Michail Antonio had scored in each half to see the score at 2-2 going into the final 10 minutes of the game.
And then Winston Reid happened.
I’ll never forget the way he rose up and headed the ball past David De Gea in front of the Bobby Moore Stand. I’ll never ever forget a moment, or a night, like that.
I still get goosebumps thinking about it.
We left the Boleyn on a high as we made our way to the glitzy former Olympic Stadium, which has had similar nights to that one we had against Man United. As a Brit who follows the Olympics, that Super Saturday was also a sporting occasion I’ll never forget.
But we haven’t had anything like that yet as West Ham fans.
We’ve had disappointment after disappointment, woeful signing after woeful signing and three different managers. It just didn’t feel right at the London Stadium. It failed to feel like home.
When fans invaded the pitch and tried to storm the directors’ box in March 2018, we’d reached breaking point. Our relationship with David Gold, David Sullivan and Karren Brady had soured until the point where it couldn’t be fixed and to this day, it’s hard to check in on Twitter without #GSBOUT appearing somewhere on your feed.
It felt as though we had hit an all-time low on that day when Burnley. Seeing Mark Noble confronting a fan, some supporters worrying about their safety and the sheer level of anger was sickening to take in.
Less than three years prior to that, we’d witnessed the most unforgettable scenes at the Boleyn Ground. At the London Stadium, we’d witnessed anarchy and chaos.
It’s been almost three years since that incident and a lot has changed.
For starters, the stadium looks more like the home of West Ham but for me, the biggest thing is that absence has made the heart grow fonder.
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit the entire population of the world in one way or another. West Ham fans – except for the lucky 2,000 who got to watch the Man United last game las month – haven’t flooded the turnstiles en masse at the London Stadium since February 29.
Jarrod Bowen, Sebastien Haller and Antonio all scored in a 3-1 win against Southampton no that day – a huge moment in our bid to survive the drop last term with David Moyes at the helm.
Since then, Moyes has kept us up and put together a really impressive West Ham team that is currently seventh in the Premier League and just six points shy of first-placed Man United.
We’re now desperate to go back to a place that we didn’t consider home for so long. We don’t find ourselves longing to return to the Boleyn half as much as we want to go and watch Moyes’ in-form Irons take on Liverpool at the end of the month in their next home Premier League match.
Is the London Stadium really home now? For me, it feels that way.
In other West Ham news, Frank McAvennie has urged the Irons to sign Danny Ings.