West Ham United co-chairman David Gold has blamed jet lag for a social media mistake that suggested he wanted Sam Allardyce to be removed as the club’s manager.
Having travelled with the club on their pre-season tour of New Zealand, Gold said he had “favourites” a tweet sent to him by a supporter that called for Allardyce to be sacked.
Allardyce remains under pressure, having survived calls from unhappy supporters last season for him to be replaced. The supporters are not pleased with the style of football adopted by the former Bolton Wanderers, Newcastle United and Blackburn Rovers manager.
Read more: Sam Allardyce already in the hot seat at West Ham United
Gold, along with co-chairman David Sullivan, stood by Allardyce, 59, after a series of post-season meetings, but uncertainty still surrounds the manager’s future following poor performances in two defeats in New Zealand on their tour.
Gold said of the Twitter incident: “After a 33-hour flight from New Zealand, I was in my car scanning through my tweets and it seems I accidently (sic) favourites one,” he wrote. “It has made some of the papers today, so I should clarify that I did not and would never deliberately or intentionally endorse a tweet that questions our manager’s position. Lesson: don’t use Twitter when you’re jet lagged!”
Allardyce saw his side jeered off the pitch after an unconvincing 2-1 win over 10-man Hull City in March, with banners unfurled at later matches urging the board to make a change.
Sullivan also seemed to make Allardyce’s position more awkward last week when he revealed the board and manager were at odds over the future of Ravel Morrison – with the owners wanting to tie down the England Under-21 international on a longer contract despite Allardyce having suggested he does not have a future in his side.
Allardyce had said after Saturday’s 3-1 defeat to Sydney FC: “We are working on our new style. That’s what is demanded now, so we are working on that side of it.
“We just lost the defensive resilience we had last season. We’re trying to play and open teams up so we left too many spaces.”
With the club’s record signing Andy Carroll, who missed the first half of last season, again sidelined for the opening months of this season with an ankle injury, Allardyce will be hoping Enner Valencia can step in after the Ecuadorean was awarded a work permit to complete a move to Upton Park from Mexican club Pachua yesterday.
The consolation for Gold is that Allardyce is unlikely to have personally read the tweet, as Allardyce said of Twitter in a news conference with English media in February, “I think that social media is for everybody else, it’s not for me. I don’t look at it, I don’t read it, wherever it comes from.
“Other people tell me of course. So the chairman likes to communicate with his fans and there is nothing wrong with that. I’d like to see the ones that he blocks off though, that abuse him, or abuse me, or abuse us all, which happens, and that’s why I don’t like it.”
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