It’s a midweek evening, it’s pouring with rain, the summer’s over, it’s getting dark. God, it’s awful. And if you’re a West Ham fan it’s even worse than for most.

A great win away to Arsenal livened up a miserable start to the season, but defeats to Bournemouth and Leicester have brought back the dark cloud of East London depression. And on a midweek evening, West Ham fans should be preparing to watch their team play a second leg of a Europa League qualifier, not lament their glaring failures while watching Manchester United and Southampton get ready for their European games. It’s all a little bit grim for West Ham.

It all started so brightly - a new manager promising to play beautiful football, great signings like Payet and Ogbonna, a European adventure and big last hurrah for their grand old Boleyn Ground. But Slaven Bilic and his merry men weren’t afforded the luxury of bedding into their season and having an easy start - they were thrown into Europa League qualification before July had even finished. It wasn’t an ideal position to be in, but the Hammers didn’t do themselves any favours.

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And you need to bed in when a new manager comes into a club. Players try too hard to impress the new boss: they press too much and run out of their positions, or they rush towards the ball instead of marking their man. They hit shots from hopeless positions, even fly into tackles they know they can’t win. All in the name of impressing the new manager. You also expect a bit of defensive indiscipline, in particular - if there’s a new system in place, it takes time to get used to it before you fully adapt.

But West Ham’s indiscipline has been much worse than that. They’ve simply let themselves go in the first few weeks of this fledgling campaign. From indiscipline in footballing terms to behavioural indiscipline. Five red cards already shows exactly that.

But it’s not simply indiscipline that’s cost West Ham this season. It’s maybe over simplistic to blame the red cards, but having fewer players than the opposition obviously makes things much more difficult for the Hammers. If they had managed to keep their players on the pitch against Astra Giurgiu, West Ham may still be in Europe now. And the feel-good factor of European progression may have made their start to the season much easier. Success breeds success.

Instead, here we are on a grim, grey midweek in England when Hammers’ fans should be dreaming of a trip to sunnier climes to see their side make progress. Slaven Bilic must be thinking the same thing.

But West Ham have deeper problems than simple red cards. You have to ask why they’re getting the red cards. The ineptitude of the West Ham defence at the weekend against Bournemouth showed just how big a mountain it is for Bilic’s side to climb this season given where they are just now. The arguments will centre around the fact that red cards are already costing West Ham, and they’ll point out that this would never have happened under Sam Allardyce.

But that misses a point somewhere along the line. West Ham brought Bilic into the club because he wants to play ‘the West Ham way’ - that is, free-flowing, pretty football, I guess. The kind of football everyone wants to see. And in order to do that, you need players willing to be a bit more expressive. And that usually means less discipline somewhere along the line - although, it certainly doesn’t mean running out and getting a straight red card.

The problem isn’t with the manager just yet, nor is the root of the problem red cards either. The root of the problem is some terrible defending that has forced red cards onto the team - the last two at least. If Max Gradel wasn’t allowed to rob Carl Jenkinson of the ball quite so easily, then Jenkinson wouldn’t have had to bring him down. If West Ham weren’t chasing the game then Adrian would never have been in the position to plant his studs into Jamie Vardy’s midriff.

The fact is, West Ham’s defensive indiscipline has laid the foundations for their behavioural indiscipline, as it were.

A balance must be struck, one between discipline and creativity. Bilic is trying to foster a more creative approach at West Ham, turn his players from soldiers into poets, but that’s never going to happen. In football everyone is a soldier, discipline is necessary: no matter how well you attack you still need to defend well.

Otherwise you’ll turn into Bayern Munich in 2014. The best Bilic can hope for isn’t turning soldiers into poets, it’s simply instilling a love of poetry into his soldiers.

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