The look on Michail Antonio’s face said it all following West Ham United’s 2-1 Premier League defeat at Chelsea.
The Irons’ No9 should have been celebrating his first top-flight goal of the season and at least a hard-earned draw for his side at Stamford Bridge, but instead he was left disappointed, frustrated and shrugging his shoulders at the way his physical style of play has seemingly next to no place in the game in 2022.
Antonio was repeatedly penalised for fouling Chelsea centre-back Tiago Silva, then booked for an altercation with Reece James after the right-back appeared to kick out after being fouled by the West Ham No9 – an incident that was not deemed worthy of review by VAR Jarred Gillett.
However, the same could not be said of the late coming together between Jarrod Bowen and Chelsea goalkeeper Édouard Mendy in the seconds before Maxwel Cornet smashed in what appeared to be a late equaliser for the Irons, who had taken the lead through Antonio’s close-range finish, then lost it to goals from home substitutes Ben Chilwell and Kai Havertz.
Instead, Gillett reviewed the footage of Bowen clipping Mendy with his trailing leg after the Chelsea No1 had pushed the ball away to Cornet, called referee Andy Madley to the pitchside monitor, and the man in the middle disallowed the leveller for a foul by West Ham’s England forward.
And so, having looked good to gain at least a point in west London, Antonio and his teammates headed home with nothing to show for a compact, determined and, until the final 15 minutes, defensively resilient performance.
Michail, I think your face says it all?
“It’s embarrassing. It’s actually embarrassing. It’s happened twice now – Nottingham Forest and today. Points aren’t easy to come by in the Premier League and these big mistakes are killing us.”
Have you seen it back? There is contact, I suppose, but the speed of the game…
“The speed of the game and you can see that Jarrod’s intent is to jump. He has also been pushed, so he’s not just jumping out the way as if it’s easy for him as he's been pushed and is unbalanced. He’s jumped and he’s caught him slightly, but there is not enough contact to for you to say it’s a foul. What I don’t understand is, if they’re going to say this season, that they’re going to be less lenient on free-kicks, and there needs to be a lot more contact, my question is: Would you give that foul as a penalty if it was the other way? I don’t think so.”
It was noticeable in the first half, a couple of times you just didn’t even appeal when there was contact between yourself and Thiago Silva. Have you got to this stage now where you just think it’s just not worth me wasting your energy appealing those decisions?
“Yeah, exactly. Like, it’s got to that stage where I’m giving little nudges and he’s getting free-kicks and I’m getting my nudges and I get nothing. It’s been happening for the last three years so I’ve just got to deal with it, move on and see what happens afterwards, so it’s very frustrating. The most disappointing thing is that we’ve got nothing from the game. If we’d got a draw out of that then we’d be disappointed anyway, but we’d be like, ‘alright, at least we’ve got something’ but the fact we’ve got nothing to show from it, it’s hard to take.”
It’s a Premier League goal for yourself, at least?
“Yeah, my first goal of the season in the Premier League, so hopefully I can build on that. This is a positive to take from the game and we are going to take the positives hopefully into the next game.”
It looks like we’ve got goals in the team. Maxwel came on and ‘scored’ and Lucas looks like he’s settling in quickly?
“Yeah, Maxwel was quality last season for Burnley and hopefully can have that same flourish for us. With Paquetá, everyone knows how good he is in the holes and he needs to kind of find this his way on the field right now, but you can definitely see the quality that he’s got and hopefully he can find his feet quickly.”
We’ve got a European match again on Thursday. It’s relentless at the moment, but we’re at home and want to get back to winning ways?
“Yeah, definitely. One thing is that the games keep coming thick and fast and we’ve picked up and we’ve been playing well. In moments today, we showed them the quality that we have on the ball and hopefully we can take that into the game on Thursday.”
