Top News

West Ham United’s record Premier League goalscorer was not always deployed as a striker – and he wasn’t always pleased about the positions he was asked to play.

Over the course of his ten years at West Ham United, Michail Antonio’s spell at the club came to represent adaptability, perseverance, and a readiness to take on whatever task the team needed him to perform.

The Jamaican international ultimately found his place leading the line, but his journey to that role included being shifted across multiple positions on the pitch – one of which he particularly disliked.

That moment arrived when Antonio was asked to fill in as a right-back – a stint that would later lead to a heated dressing room exchange, a managerial change, and eventually his conversion into a centre-forward.

“All the right-backs were injured, and it was just me left,” Antonio recalled in an interview with FourFourTwo. “I actually did quite well – I think I scored seven goals from right-back and got a few assists. A couple of clubs were even interested in me. Antonio Conte wanted me at Chelsea, looking to use me as a wing-back like Victor Moses, but nothing came of it.”

Despite those respectable performances in defence, Antonio admitted that the position never felt right for him.

“I hated playing there,” he confessed. “When I came back for pre-season at West Ham, I thought, ‘Okay, the club will sign some right-backs,’ but Slaven Bilic did the opposite – he sold the right-backs because he thought I was going to play there!

“He told me, ‘I’m going to make you the best right-back in Europe,’ but I said, ‘I don’t want to be – I’d rather be an average Premier League winger.’ He told me to trust him, but in a match against Chelsea, I tried to flick the ball over Eden Hazard to pass it wide, they blocked it, and I ended up conceding a penalty.”

Antonio said that the incident led to serious friction after the match. “Slaven pulled me up about it – after the game, he said to me, ‘If I need you to play somewhere, you play there!’ I replied, ‘I’ll never play there again, I don’t want to play that position ever again!’ Then Mark Noble started arguing with me, so I stormed out of the changing room and took a taxi home.”

Following that episode, Antonio gradually transitioned into more attacking roles, moving from a traditional right winger to playing as a central striker.

“That was under Manuel Pellegrini,” he explained. “We were struggling at the time, and I had just come back from injury. The manager switched our formation from 4-5-1 to 4-4-2, with me and Sebastien Haller up front. When Seb wasn’t performing well because the system didn’t suit his style, Pellegrini pushed me into the striker’s role.”

He continued, “I played four games up front and did well. When Pellegrini was sacked and David Moyes came in, that was it – I became the number nine from then on.”

During this period, West Ham developed a reputation for signing big-name forwards who failed to impress, fuelling talk among fans of a curse on the club’s number nine shirt. Antonio, however, managed to break that pattern.

“That’s exactly what it was before I moved up front,” he said. “Every striker that came in didn’t score much, and then I moved from winger to striker. I think because I was already at the club, the curse didn’t affect me!”

Michail Antonio’s autobiography ‘Humans Not Robots’, published by HarperCollins, is available now.

By Chris Flanagan, Senior Staff Writer