The abject manner of West Ham United’s defending against Brentford was not lost on either Gary Lineker or Alan Shearer.
While the Hammers can count themselves reasonably unlucky not to have scored at the Gtech Community Stadium, the defensive platform upon which they have built their recent rise was all at sea on Saturday.
On a scale of 1-10, how confident are you about staying up now? 👀
Indeed, West Ham were awful defensively in their 3-0 loss to Brentford, and Tottenham’s win over Aston Villa meant Nuno Espirito Santo’s side duly slipped back into the bottom three.
Lineker and Shearer have both been impressed with West Ham in recent weeks, but they were in full agreement about the state of their defence on Saturday.
Lineker and Shearer criticise West Ham’s defending in Brentford defeat
The two pundits were speaking on the latest episode of The Rest Is Football.
Of West Ham’s defensive performance, Lineker said: “They made a couple of appalling kind of defensive [mistakes].”
Shearer then agreed: “Yeah, terrible.”
What a sorry old mess 😪 How have we let it slip AGAIN?!
The poor defensive display is what hurts most, really. West Ham, right now, are not a side who are going to blow many teams away with the quality of their attacking play, after all.
Rather, their survival bid leaned heavily on an improving defence to keep games tight, hoping to edge games based upon that platform.
To see it torn apart with relative ease on Saturday was an alarming disappointment. Without a strong defence, West Ham do not have a chance of staying up.
There are still games left to rectify this, but belief is waning after a dreadful weekend for them towards the bottom of the Premier League table.
West Ham are sliding towards the Championship and they desperately need a response.
The defensive players have broadly done well in recent weeks but they were found lacking on Saturday and, if that continues, they may as well bid farewell to the Premier League now.
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