One West Ham player let himself and his team down towards the end of their 5-0 drubbing at the hands of a rampant Liverpool on Sunday evening.
The Irons had been steadily building a run of good form in December but they simply had no answer to the Premier League leaders, who toyed with Julen Lopetegui’s side at the London Stadium yesterday.
A miserable night for the home team was compounded by an incident in the lead-up to the final goal which might’ve evaded the attention of some viewers at the time.
As Mo Salah won possession just inside Liverpool’s half of the pitch, Diogo Jota was matching his run just behind him.
The 28-year-old shook off the close attention of Lucas Paqueta, who attempted to elbow him in the back, only for our number 20 to keep going and, just a few seconds later, make it 5-0 to the Reds.
Even some observers of a West Ham persuasion were disgusted by the Brazilian’s shameful efforts to impede Jota, with words such as ‘utterly embarrassing‘, ‘unacceptable‘ and ‘a disgrace‘ used to describe the attempted elbow on the Liverpool forward.
The incident came just a couple of days after Joao Pedro’s vicious swing towards Brentford’s Yehor Yarmolyuk, an act for which the Brighton defender inexplicably escaped a red card even after a VAR review.
Had Paqueta simply pulled Jota’s shirt and taken a booking, at least we could’ve excused it as a case of taking one for the team, but to attempt the use of force to stop the Portugal international in his tracks is something we don’t want to see.
Not that Jota seemed overly perturbed as he simply carried on with his run before dispatching the ball to the West Ham net to round off a comprehensive victory for Liverpool.
It remains to be seen whether or not the FA will take retrospective action against Paqueta over the incident. If they do, he wouldn’t exactly be missed, juding by what some Irons supporters have said about the 27-year-old.
You can view Paqueta’s attempted elbow on Jota below, via @story98394 on X:
— . (@story98394) December 29, 2024
The post (Video) Liverpool fans won’t like what one West Ham player did in lead-up to goal in 5-0 rout appeared first on The Empire of The Kop.
