As the minutes leaked away in east London, the trickle of West Ham fans heading for the exits began to swell and thicken: first dozens, then hundreds and finally thousands. By full time there were white plastic seats as far as the eye could see. Perhaps this will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever found themselves trapped in the infamous London Stadium kettle, where the queues outside Stratford station can last well over an hour and you eventually begin to wonder whether you will ever see your family again.
Still, with West Ham straining every sinew in search of a famous equaliser, it was a strange look. Certainly, you had to wonder at the risk-reward calculus. Cons: potentially missing a defining last-minute goal in your team’s first European semi-final for 46 years. Pros: getting a seat on the Jubilee Line. And as the home side slipped to a disappointing if eminently retrievable defeat, it felt like an appropriate metaphor for a game in which they could just have dared a little more, dreamed a little harder.
You couldn’t fault West Ham’s commitment. They ran and chased and weathered the frequent squalls of pressure with courage. They put their necks on the line, and sometimes – as when Jarrod Bowen painfully found himself on the wrong end of a cross from Filip Kostic – even more tender parts of their anatomy. But against an Eintracht Frankfurt side who had conquered the Camp Nou and no longer feared anything or anyone, West Ham needed players to step up, to gild the game with class, to take their chances. Too many of them had 7/10 games.
Declan Rice tried. It had been a poor start for West Ham’s captain, failing to get close enough to Daichi Kamada or Rafael Borré as they created an opening goal for Ansgar Knauff within 50 seconds. But he grew into the game as it went on, playing braver passes, finding more dangerous spaces, keeping the attacks ticking over.
Bowen tried. It was his spectacular bicycle kick deep into injury time that rattled the bar and brought the departing West Ham fans sprinting back through the concourses. Bowen was a nuisance all night, winning crucial free-kicks and checking the forward runs of Kostic. But as ever, the quality of his final ball was mixed and he should probably have scored a one-on-one early in the first half.
But nobody tried harder than Michail Antonio. As West Ham reeled from the early Frankfurt goal, you could see David Moyes urging his side to recycle the ball quicker, to put it at risk, to get it forward. The game was already beginning to settle into a structure and that favoured Frankfurt. Borré was dragging West Ham’s defence out of shape and Sebastian Rode was running the midfield. What was needed was a dose of chaos. What was needed was Antonio.
There are few more tantalising moments in football than the few seconds when the ball is rolling towards Antonio, with a defender close by. Long before the ball has reached either of them you can see them grappling and jostling for supremacy, a flurry of arms and legs and torsos at unusual angles, like two men playing Twister in the back of a Volvo. When the ball finally arrives, pretty much anything can happen: a clearance, a free-kick, a clear run on goal, an opposition counterattack. You can never really be sure.
Moyes’s side is well-organised, well-drilled and sometimes a little predictable. More than anyone it is Antonio who gives them that point of difference, that little twist of the unknown. Perhaps he lacks the consistency to be considered among the Premier League’s elite strikers. He can go on mighty hot streaks, but until his equalising goal here he had not scored in almost two months.
But he always gives you an almighty work rate in attack and defence, a physical presence up front, and above all occupies defenders to the point where they are barely capable of thinking about anything else.
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West Ham looked a little flat in the second half, perhaps as a result of all those games in their legs, and too often the telling pass or quality cross seemed to elude them. Kamada’s winning goal was probably deserved and had he scored 12 minutes from time rather than hitting the post, the tie might already be over. But if there was a positive to come out of this game then the return of Antonio to scoring form might just be it: a timely jolt of confidence just as West Ham’s season begins to sharpen to a point.
And nothing has been decided or settled yet. Lest we forget, Eintracht Frankfurt have won once at home in four months in all competitions, a team who thrive at breaking games open but are often less adept at controlling them. Urged forward by their boisterous home crowd, there will be frailties to exploit and wide open spaces to be found. And the tireless Antonio will be their best hope of finding them.