The kids are still United

Jordan Spence has expressed his disappointment after West Ham were sent crashing out of the Capital One Cup on Tuesday evening.

The Hammers were beaten 4-1 on the night with Sam Allardyce receiving criticism from some quarters for dropping so many established first team players. Nine of the team that had drawn with Sunderland 72 hours earlier were absent from the starting line-up against the Latics.

However that afforded the under-fire manager the opportunity to test a number of youngsters on the fringe of the first team squad.

Along with Spence, Robert Hall, Danny Potts, Matthias Fanimo and Dylan Tombides all featured at some stage of the game in which West Ham took an early lead through Modibo Maiga before shipping four goals and thus denying them the chance to face Bradford in the next round.

To Spence's credit, he admitted that the whole performance - including his own - had been under par. "It was a good opportunity for us younger lads to come in and gain experience and show that we are still pushing for a place in the first team," he told whufc.com. "Unfortunately, we didn't do that.

"I will go away now and analyse the game from a personal point of view to see what I did well and what I can do better because I am all about improving.

"To concede four goals and to lose the game the way we did is extremely disappointing. But we didn't do enough defensively to warrant anything from the game."

The most positive note of a desperately disappointing night was the first team debut of Dylan Tombides, who was only given the all-clear to resume his career in April following his recovery from testicular cancer.

And Hammers legend Julian Dicks, speaking in his latest column for KUMB.com was full of praise for the young Australian striker. "Fighting cancer is going to be the biggest battle of his career," he said. "Everything else should be easy by comparison.

"For him to get over that is incredible and it's great to see him back and getting a few minutes on the pitch."

You may read Julian's latest column - in which he also discusses last weekend's Sunderland game, the League Cup semi finals of 1989 and 1990 plus the sad loss of John Bond at kumb.com/article.php?id=3111.