West Ham: Newcastle defeat a missed opportunity as Graham Potter expectations tempered | OneFootball

Tomas Soucek’s early miss proves costly as Hammers see winning run ended in frustrating fashion

Match-winner: Bruno Guimaraes scored the only goal of the game as Newcastle beat West Ham on Monday night

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When the dust has settled, this will tally as a missed opportunity for West Ham.

They were beaten 1-0 by a Newcastle team far from firing on all cylinders (Anthony Gordon and Lewis Hall were both absent) and whose attention was, even if just subconsciously, more on Sunday’s Carabao Cup final than this Premier League encounter with a side with little left to play for in the final two-and-a-half months of the season.

Here was a nervy audition for a cup final from Newcastle colliding with a rather error-prone performance by West Ham, unchanged from that Leicester win. Bruno Guimaraes’s volley got Newcastle over the line.

James Ward-Prowse and Tomas Soucek were guilty of being too easily passed by in midfield, while Edson Alvarez lasted just over an hour, having too often found his attempted through balls snuffed out.

Aaron Cresswell encouraged everyone in claret and blue up for a long free-kick shortly before half-time, only to float his delivery straight into the arms of Nick Pope.

Neither Mohammed Kudus nor Jarrod Bowen can claim to be enjoying as prolific a season as they both achieved last term, and they were out of sync as Potter’s strike partners.

At one point Kudus tackled Bowen, who could have slipped through and gone on, and Bowen looked to the heavens in frustration. Later, Kudus checked back from a one-on-one and found Bowen, only for the Englishman’s first-time strike to hit Kudus.

The costliest misstep by a West Ham player was so nearly the fluky hashed clearance by Max Kilman, which looped up behind him and dipped below the crossbar, only for Alphonse Areola to spring across and claw away to prevent what would have been an utterly calamitous own goal. Alexander Isak flicked over from the rebound.

The first half was not without its chances, and West Ham were fortunate that Areola was up to the task of blocking Newcastle’s two best, both of which fell to Harvey Barnes. First a flick, then a flicked header — each time, Areola parried.

Yet it was West Ham who squandered the best chance, and it is one which is likely to keep Soucek up long into the night. Kudus’s cross found its way through to the Czech, but his first touch let him down and set him en route to blazing over from close range. Not even 50 seconds had been played; some start it could, and should, have been.

Potter turned to the bench in the second half, turned to Lucas Paqueta, back from his ankle injury, and then to strikers Evan Ferguson and Danny Ings. But nothing was quite tidy enough in the final third to produce the equaliser.

Soucek’s first-minute miss, by the end, felt all the more consequential. West Ham simply didn’t do enough.