On Saturday and Sunday, West Ham's players will train on the London Stadium's pitch, ahead of Monday night's match against Huddersfield Town. It will be the first time they will have been in the home dressing room for four months.
The former Olympic Stadium has had a busy summer in its role as a multipurpose facility. Since May 14's 4-0 May defeat to Liverpool, it has housed rock concerts by Guns N' Roses, Robbie Williams and Depeche Mode, the London Anniversary Games, the World Para Athletics Championships and been the scene of Mo Farah and Usain Bolt's farewells at the World Athletic Championships.
On their return, barring heavy weekend defeats for Crystal Palace and Bournemouth, Slaven Bilic's team will kick off their second season at the stadium sitting rock-bottom of the table. They have been beaten in all three league matches so far, and the manager's future is a subject of heavy speculation. The sense of a club in flux has been enhanced by the war of words that has raged between co-chairman David Sullivan and Sporting Lisbon president Bruno de Carvalho over a failed attempt to sign midfielder William Carvalho; West Ham's transfer deadline day closed with not a single player being added to Bilic's squad.
As Leicester City have found in their wrangle with Sporting over Adrien Silva's botched transfer, De Carvalho, who has been labelled the "Donald Trump of Portuguese football" and is one of European football's sharpest operators, is someone to bait at your peril. The leaking of a Sullivan email in which a bid was made for Carvalho provoked a response both furious and comedic, as De Carvalho threatened to report West Ham to FIFA before labelling Sullivan and fellow co-chairman David Gold "the Dildo Brothers", a barbed reference to the pair making their fortune from adult entertainment.
Bilic was an amused onlooker to that spat, but was unhappy that primary target Carvalho did not arrive. "It's funny," he said on Friday, speaking at the club's Rush Green training ground. "It made me laugh, but what I know about that transfer is that I wanted the player. I was hoping till midnight basically."
Last weekend, in an ill-starred attempt to calm down fans' anger at that lack of deadline-day additions, Sullivan, having been criticised for holidaying in Marbella, Spain last Thursday while other Premier League clubs were spending a collective £210 million, suggested in a club statement that Bilic had turned down the chance to loan Grzegorz Krychowiak from Paris Saint-Germain and Renato Sanches from Bayern Munich, elite players who ended up at West Brom and Swansea respectively.
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It read like Bilic was being undermined by his boss, and on Friday, he was halting and evasive in response to questions on that subject. "David Sullivan likes to talk, it's his right to be able to," he said. "That is not exactly what happened with those two. The window is finished. I can understand you want to talk about that, but my job is not to talk about that. If you want to ask others responsible, you can...I am expecting if he says something about me to call me, to say this and not go through you guys [the media] although that is best for you."
Until West Ham turn their form around, with Monday's fixture against David Wagner's Huddersfield, who have begun Premier League life with a bounce and are yet to concede a goal, the summer's dealings will be an unavoidable topic of discussion.
Of the four senior players who arrived this summer, only Javier Hernandez's two goals in a 3-2 defeat at Southampton has registered a positive impression. That match was lost after £23m club-record signing Marko Arnautovic got himself red-carded for a vicious elbow on Saints defender Jack Stephens.
Joe Hart and Pablo Zabaleta have meanwhile played in a defence that has conceded 10 goals so far, meaning Bilic has very few positives to fall back on. The loss of Manuel Lanzini to a knee problem aggravated while on international duty with Argentina only adds to his problems.
"I wanted Carvalho," he said in exasperation. "F*** it now, you know what I mean? I have a good team. For the moment, I don't want to talk about Carvalho, I said everything to you. I want to prepare for Huddersfield. We are definitely better mentally although only a win will get us back."
Like Frank de Boer at Crystal Palace, another London manager speculated as having one game to save his job, Bilic is at a point where talk has become cheap.
"Working hard, by changing something, by keeping working," he suggested as paths to that first victory of the season. "New ideas, lift the confidence, try to win, because there's nothing better than that to get back on track."
Source: espn.co.uk