'I was involved in West Ham's great escape – the club are moving in the right direction'

Former West Ham striker Carlton Cole knows what it’s like to be on both sides of the relegation dotted line with the club. The England international was part of the squad which fell into the Championship under Avram Grant in 2011. Four years before that he helped the club stave off the drop when all had appeared lost.

Cole joined from Chelsea ahead of the 2006/07 season and scored on his debut but it was a campaign of turmoil for the Hammers. Alan Pardew was sacked as manager in December and - after a brief uptick under Alan Curbishley - an agonising 4-3 defeat at home to Tottenham in March left the club 10 points from safety with just nine games to go.

Remarkably, they won more points in their final nine matches than in their first 29, thanks in no small part to the heroics of Carlos Tevez . There are some parallels this season, though the survival efforts were ramped up a little earlier: West Ham sat 13 points behind Tottenham the day before they beat their London rivals away from home in mid-January and now sit two points clear of Spurs.

Cole, who has held a number of roles with his former club since hanging up his boots in 2018, has seen first-hand how this season’s efforts have unfolded. However, he recognises there is still work to do in the final five games of the season.

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“At the end of it, I think what you're getting is a lot of players understanding that if they don't get their finger out, things can change drastically,” Cole told Mirror Football . “And it's not just them, I think they understand how much it affects the club, the people that work at the club, the people behind the scenes. It can affect the trajectory of the club and the club's direction [and] I think the players here get that.

“One thing that I would say that's working in our favour is the appointment of Nuno. Nuno has been unbelievable. He gets it. He's had a little bit of time to work out who's there for him and his best team, but now you can see that we are moving in the right direction, getting points on the table, making sure that we respect the points as well, and we're moving in the right direction as a team.

“The broader aspect of it is that when you come to the training ground, everybody is on the same page. Everybody's connected to the club and wants the club to do well, there's no diversion of the success that needs to be done to get us to a level where we can just not look over our shoulder anymore.”

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Cole is still hopeful the Hammers can get the job done before the final day of the season, when they face a Leeds side who handed them a painful FA Cup elimination in early April. Nuno’s men host Everton this weekend, in a designated DT38 Foundation match honouring the memory of Cole’s former team-mate Dylan Tombides , while Spurs are away to already-relegated Wolves . West Ham have only spent five weeks outside the bottom three this term but are above the dotted line with a month of the campaign to go - something which they couldn’t say in 2007.

“The thing about football is not just one player,” Cole added. “We were out on the training pitch [this week] and you see the vibes, everything was correct because everybody's looking forward to the game on a Saturday.

“We were a little bit scared of going into a game on a Saturday and you need some characters in the dressing room to try and take you out of that. When you look at that time when Tevez was here, we were relying on Tevez, we were relying on Mascherano, we were relying on the big players trying to make a big impact where it should always be a team.

“But Tevez at that point did really well for us. He woke up at the right time. He started playing well and that's when we started to climb the table and get out of the situation."

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After Saturday’s game at Everton, West Ham round off the season with matches against Brentford, Arsenal , Newcastle and Leeds. It’s arguably a tougher schedule than the one faced by the teams around them but Cole recognises now is not the time to rely on favours from elsewhere.

“As footballers you've got to take the rough with the smooth. Also, you've got to understand the backroom staff have been propping up the ballers to make sure that they're going to perform on the weekend.

“That's all you can do. There's nothing else that matters but what the result is on the weekend. We can do all we want behind the scenes, but that result on the weekend is the most important thing because that props us up to stay in the Premier League and [keep] our Premier League status.

“The main thing for us is just to focus on the next game, the next training session, making sure everybody's on the same page. And then we'll climb the table as it should be.”

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