It was a very modern story, which is to say that it involved social media and contained very little actual news. In November, David Gold, the West Ham United chairman and co-owner, retweeted a picture, supposedly from a concerned individual looking for a friend last seen in Manchester some weeks before. Beneath the message was a picture of Michail Antonio.
The winger had already been a West Ham player for more than two months by then. He had made a solitary appearance and, clearly, very little impression on his employer. But then the strange thing about Antonio is that he and his abilities went unrecognised for so long.
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Ten months on, there is a ubiquity about him. His was the surprise name in Sam Allardyce’s first England squad, which was named on Sunday. Every West Ham game seems to revolve around Antonio, for better and worse.
He was the breakout star of an upwardly mobile club’s encouraging, entertaining campaign last year. They have played three league games this season. In the first, at Chelsea, Antonio conceded a penalty and was promptly substituted by a clearly unimpressed Slaven Bilic. In the second, at home to Bournemouth, Antonio scored the winner, West Ham’s first league goal at the London Stadium. In the third, Manchester City’s Nolito escaped Antonio to set up the opening goal, but he halved West Ham’s deficit with another forceful far-post header.
A player who has improved dramatically under Bilic now appears an indictment of him. West Ham have conceded 23 goals in their last 12 league games, a time when the Croatian has tended to use a potent winger as a right-back. Antonio began on Sunday as a wing-back, an odd deployment of the most potent attacker of a side shorn of most of its other goal threats. It was an experiment that should have been abandoned long ago.
Bilic’s quirkiness forms part of his charm, but this is increasingly looking like a refusal to learn lessons games provide. In the process, a match-winner is costing West Ham. Opposing left wingers have a growing tendency to supply goals or assists against East London club.
Perhaps it is Antonio’s endearing eagerness and his capacity to confound expectations that makes managers think he has the can-do mentality to turn his hand to anything. A player who was plying his trade in England’s seventh tier, with Tooting & Mitcham United, at 18 is aware that there are worse things than being played out of position in the Premier League.
Allardyce called his rise “a great journey” and it drew comparisons with Jamie Vardy, another who languished in non-league at a point when contemporaries were being groomed for greatness in the elite clubs’ academies.
The ever smiling Antonio presents a different image to Vardy, with his trademark frown, but self-made footballers can display similarities. Their game is not about technical refinement. They offer the hunger of men determined to make up for lost time and the sheer power to surge beyond opponents. Antonio can seem an oddity, a winger who has scored the most headers in the Premier League since he made his debut. He offers an exuberant rawness.
In his background and his style of play alike, he is an anomaly, a throwback to bygone days, albeit with very modern goal celebrations. He has been rewarded for continuing to believe; he rejected a call-up from Jamaica in March out of a conviction he could play for England. His aerial ability may have helped him reach new heights
And yet it is tempting to wonder if, just as his star has risen with the national team, his prospects are waning at club level. Bilic has made 11 signings this summer. None was a right-back, even though he seems to have little confidence in Sam Byram, the one specialist. Many – Gokhan Tore, Sofiane Feghouli, Andre Ayew, Simone Zaza, Manuel Lanzini – can operate as wingers. Antonio’s deadliness in his preferred position should count for more than it seems to.
At least Allardyce’s England squad indicated a truer recognition of his merits. Because he was listed as a midfielder in a group that contained, in Kyle Walker and Nathaniel Clyne, two out-and-out right-backs.
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