It’s time for West Ham fans to give Alan Curbishley some serious credit for where he has taken us this season.

Let’s face it, seeing as we like to pride ourselves on the fact that we’re not deluded Geordies and therefore still have some grip on footballing reality, most of us would have been happy last August to know that half-way through the season we’d be securely in the top half of the table, only four points off the final Champions’ League place if we were to win our (admittedly tough) game in hand - and for good measure seven points ahead of Spurs.

That we’ve got here with a horrendous sequence of injuries, starting with all our summer signings, feels downright miraculous, especially since my entire West Ham-supporting life we have struggled when we have had to get by with squad players.

'Maybe that’s the problem. We gave our heart to Pardew and it hurt too much when it all went wrong to give it again until we know it won’t all end in tears'


We’ve also seen individual players improve under Curbishley’s influence. Matthew Upson looks a top-class Premier League defender and his distribution is much better than when he arrived. Carlton Cole and Lee Bowyer have been unrecognisable from last season, Luis Boa Morte has shown that maybe there was some reason to splash £5 million on him, and Haydon Mullins has added an attacking impulse to his game that wasn’t there even in his halcyon days under Alan Pardew.

Sure, we might seriously wonder why Curbishley ever signed some of the injury-prone players in the first place although Eggy seems to have copped the blame for Freddie Ljungberg. Curbs also needs to get whoever is temporarily fit enough to play on the right to try to stay there, something that only Nolberto Solano seems even half able to do of his own accord, and get the defenders to kick the habit of starting games by playing it long or dozing.

Yet when it comes to Curbishley we’re still holding back as if we’ve got some right to expect more. Not once this season has ‘Alan Curbishley’s claret-and-blue army' rung around Upon Park. After the debacle of the first-play off final, it took us until a Monday-night demolition of Aston Villa very early on in the 2005-6 season to give Pardew his song back.

Maybe that’s the problem. We gave our heart to Pardew and it hurt too much when it all went wrong to give it again until we know it won’t all end in tears. Neither does Curbishley exactly fall over himself to get us to love him. You get the feeling that he wants us to make more noise but to make sure that we keep our feet on the ground in doing so.

But for most clubs football does always end in tears and you just have to enjoy it when it doesn’t, and Curbishley no doubt cares more about what we think than he lets on. So next home game let’s stand up and sing for a West Ham manager who really does know what he’s doing.