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I'm going to tell you right now that I am writing under duress.

The Stoke, Everton, and Hull losses, coupled with Ginge missing the sitter at Southampton, has me in a doom and gloom state of mind. I get that way and when I do I try to blank out West Ham. Don't want to read any blogs, Twitter, websites, or listen to podcasts.

I remember during The Great Escape, the 4-3 loss at home to Spurs haunted me for months. My newborn son was up most nights for hours, screaming in pain from acid reflux, and as I held him all I could think about was Greenie giving up the rebound for their winner.

That's how I feel now.

But my best mate, Jon, has challenged me to write something optimistic. He reminded me how much I wanted Carroll at any cost. He also reminded me that I thought Downing was a good signing. When I started questioning my own opinions, he threw it all back at me. I will give it me best shot, but I'm not a happy Hammer right now.

My West Ham writing thing started in the middle of last season when Iain Dale posted my Open Letter to Andy Carroll, urging him to sign for us. With Sam in charge, the Olympic Stadium on the horizon, it looked like the perfect fit for both him and us. Now it isn't hard to look back and wonder about that decision.

But with the silly money being paid for strikers without any Premier League experience, would it have been smarter to spend twelve million pounds on Wilfred Bony? Who's to say he won't become a more expensive version of Modibo Maiga?

When the negotiations for Carroll were going on, everyone on Twitter was on a razor's edge. When David Gold tweeted something that intimated that it wasn't looking so good we all spiraled into depression, only to be reborn a few days later when the tide turned.

Yes, the injury is worrying. But the athletes noted in this Sports Illustrated article play in sports with very little time between games. Baseball barely ever stops during its season, and basketball players average two to three games per week.

If Carroll's heal is managed inbetween games, and he is held out of early rounds in the Cups, maybe it won't bother him in the same way? This is not a common injury in Football, so we can't say it will effect him the same way it does athletes in other sports.

Rationalisation number one......Done.

A lot of supporters and, according to some sources, some members of the board were apprehensive about signing Stewart Downing instead of using the money for a striker. At the time I was 100 per cent behind bringing Downing in. I believed we would still use one of our two available loan signings to get the needed striker.

That didn't happen, and the twenty-twenty hindsight crowd are still up in arms over Downing. But there is absolutely no guarantee that the striker we wanted would have come if we had those funds available.

Can you really say with certainty that Ba, Lukaku, or Defoe would be in claret and blue had Downing stayed in Liverpool? It's more likely we would signed another Maiga, or an un-tested player from The Championship. Given those choices, I think Downing will turn out to be a valuable member of the squad.

Rationalisation number two....Done.

One of my customers loaned me a book called The Numbers Game, a book analysing Football in a completely numbers-based way. I had never heard of it, but apparently it's somewhat well known.

He had read the whole thing, and gave me some snippets of information. I tried to find the passages in the book he was referring to, but that would have required me to actually READ the whole thing. I'd rather subject myself to water boarding. One of the stats he relayed to me was that clean sheets are worth more to a team on average than scoring a single goal.

In essence, the book says that teams keeping clean sheets average roughly 2.6 points per game in the games in which they keep a clean sheet. In games studied where a team scores one goal and the defensive end is not taken into consideration, teams average something like 1.4 points per game in those games.

Corners, according to the book, have no statistical value at all. So while we lament our goal scoring drought, the foundation of a solid back four should be more important to our success in the long run.

Final rationalisation......Done.

So there you have it, Jon. I've taken our current reality and tried to frame it in a way that doesn't have me walking the streets looking for a methadone clinic. I'm not too sure it will work, but at least I tried.

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