What do Alvin Martin, Mark Noble and Julian Dicks all have in common? Well, apart from having shared the captain’s armband at West Ham United, of course.
The answer? All three of these iconic skippers stepped out of the shadows and stepped up to the plate in the aftermath of relegation.
A demotion from the top-flight usually leads to an inevitable exodus. Just ask Alan Pardew; the Hammers side lost Jermain Defoe, David James and Joe Cole, plus Glen Johnson and Michael Carrick, following their exit from the Premier League back in 2003.
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West Ham United have already bid farewell to Mateus Fernandes this summer. Crysencio Summerville looks destined to follow. Yet, while slipping into the second tier closes some doors, it opens others.
The likes of Mohamadou Kante, Freddie Potts and Ezra Mayers will be determined to make the most of greater minutes afforded to them against the Lincolns, the Boltons and the Bristol Citys. As some of the greatest legends in the club’s history will tell you, clouds often have an outline of silver.
West Ham United stars who blossomed in the second tier
Alvin Martin
We will never know how one of the great West Ham careers would have turned out had John Lyall’s side survived the drop in 1978. A teenage Martin played only four times during that relegation campaign.
But across the next three years, he would form a legendary partnership with Billy Bonds before beating Arsenal in one of the biggest FA Cup shocks ever. And, eventually, securing promotion via the second tier title in 1981.
Martin would remain committed to the West Ham cause again following another relegation in ’89. There is no greater way to cement your legacy than to stay loyal amid periods of upheaval.
Speaking to talkSPORT earlier this month talkSPORT, he feels that the Hammers could bounce back stronger from their latest disappointment.
“I do think there’s a lot of optimism with what we’re looking at going forward,” Martin said, urging his current day predecessor to follow in his footsteps.
“Jarrod Bowen is so important. There have been times when good players have stayed at West Ham after relegation. I’m going back to when people like Trevor Brooking stayed and never regretted it.”
Julian Dicks
Julian Dicks made the first of 326 West Ham appearances during a 2-1 First Division defeat of Sheffield Wednesday in 1988. An inauspicious start which gave little notice of the brilliance that was to come.
In fact, the tough-tackling left-back with the power-packed penalty would later form part of two separate promotion-winning teams. The iconic 2-0 triumph over Cambridge – which secured their place in the Premier League for the very first time in 1993 – remains one of Dicks’ fondest memories.
“We’d had a very difficult couple of years, with relegation, fan protests against the Bond scheme, and the death of Bobby Moore in the February, so to win promotion to the new Premier League was a massive achievement,” he would later tell the club’s official website.
“With seconds remaining, I got on the overlap and managed to keep the ball in play in the box. I remember two things went through my mind; ‘I can shoot and be a hero if I score, or shoot and look like an idiot if I missed’.
“So, I passed the ball to Clive Allen and he tapped it in. I knew he wouldn’t miss! The scenes then were incredible. The fans rushed on to the pitch and stayed on to wait for us to come out to the Directors’ Box.
“The person I was most pleased for was Billy Bonds. I don’t think he got enough credit for steering the Club through a very turbulent period, and it was fantastic for him to have that promotion on his CV.”
Steve Potts
Father of Freddie and current assistant coach to Nuno Espirito Santo, Steve Potts is one of only five West Ham players to make over 200 Premier League starts. By his own admission, though, the Connecticut-born defender wasn’t sure if he would even go on to appear 20 times, let alone 200.
“I was never dislodging Ray Stewart at right-back,” Potts said when reminiscing about his early days as a budding, occasionally overawed youngster at Upton Park.
“‘Tonka’ was a Scottish international, who was playing really well. So, at that stage of my career, I was just asking myself: ‘Am I going to be good enough to be able to compete at this level?’”
The answer, of course, would be a resounding yes. After four years on the fringes, Potts firmly established himself as one of the first names on the team sheet following the relegation of 1989 and never looked back.
Mark Noble
Noble was only 17 years of age when Michael Carrick made that controversial switch to bitter rivals Tottenham Hotspur in 2004. If the Hammers had stayed in the Premier League, and Carrick had remained in claret and blue, it is doubtful that a teenage Hammers fanatic would have blossomed so quickly and so confidently.
That Alan Pardew entrusted Mark Noble to rise from the bench and see out that nail-biting Play-off final victory over Preston North End at the Millennium Stadium spoke volumes.
“I saw a photo of myself after the 2005 Championship Play-Off final in a recent Programme and I thought to myself: ‘I can’t believe Alan Pardew put me on, at the age of 17, 1-0 up in a huge match like that at the Millennium Stadium’,” Noble reflected while hanging up his boots in 2022.
“The fact he brought me off the bench with 15 or 20 minutes to go showed how brave he was as a manager, and also how much faith he had in me at such a young age.
“When you think of the experience in that dressing room – Teddy Sheringham, Chris Powell, Tomas Repka, Bobby Zamora, Marlon Harewood – it’s amazing how much faith he showed in me.”
Nigel Reo-Coker
Three years older than the man who would later follow in his footsteps with the captain’s armband around his bicep, while Noble played a cameo role in that promotion-winning season, Reo-Coker was front and centre.
The former Wimbledon midfielder skippered the Hammers to play-off final glory at the age of just 21.
Anton Ferdinand
While the departure of Carrick opened the door for Reo-Coker and Noble to fast-track their journey into the first-team, Anton Ferdinand seized the opportunity presented following the culling of Gary Breen.
Rio’s younger brother was thrown in at the deep end by Glenn Roeder and learned how to swim pretty quickly; an 18-year-old debutant on the opening day of the 2003/04 campaign. Ferdinand would eventually rack up a half century of West Ham appearances before his 21st birthday.
An early blunder only 90 or so seconds into that first-team bow, in hindsight, made Ferdinand’s breakout all the more impressive.
“The first two minutes of my debut for West Ham; away at Preston, live on Sky,” Ferdinand told Steven Sulley in 2021. “Ball comes into the box, I try and let it go because I think no one is around me, [Eddie Lewis] taps it in.
“David James gives me a rollicking. The West Ham fans [were saying], ‘He ain’t no Ferdinand! He ain’t Rio’s brother!’ I’m looking at the sky thinking, ‘I’m not sure if this is for me!’
“I went back to my core values. This is why I worked hard. I’m about to live my dream. It’s about to sink or swim, Anton, what are you going to do? My mind went back to remembering my goal [my ambition]. I want to see my mum’s face light up.
“We went on to win the game and I ended up playing well! It was just unbelievable.”
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Winston Reid
A 3-0 opening day defeat by Aston Villa would rather sum up Winston Reid’s debut season at Upton Park, not to mention the disastrous reign of Avram Grant. Fortunately for both player and club, fireman Sam Allardyce would arrive to put out the blaze and set the New Zealand international on his way to a terrific career in the capital.
That Villa thrashing was one of only seven Premier League games Reid played under Grant. Flash forward to 2012, and the £4 million signing from Midtjylland was juggling the Hammer of the Year award with a play-off winners’ medal.
Carlton Cole
This is a slightly different tale, given that Cole already had five seasons as a West Ham player under his belt before the club stumbled out of the top-flight in 2010. The fact that Cole is considered to be an iconic Hammers centre-forward these days, though, is mostly because of the role he played in their immediate return.
Not only did Cole score a career-best 14 goals in the Championship, he also accepted a 50 per cent wage reduction in order to stick around. The millions he lost in pay, he later said, mattered little in contrast to the joys of a Wembley win.
“I’ve kept my mouth shut for quite a while but I did take a wage cut to stay in the Championship,” Cole told The Guardian after opening the scoring in that 2-1 victory over Blackpool. “Half my wages just went.
“I thought ‘I want to help the club get back to where we belong’. I didn’t want to leave the ship. I would not have been able to live with myself. It is just such a reward to get to the Premier League again with West Ham at the first time of asking.
“It was like D‑Day for all of us.”
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