David Moyes has taken West Ham far but failure to adapt cost them dear

The clock was ticking. Eintracht Frankfurt, two goals up on aggregate, looked comfortable but not impregnable. And even with 10 men, West Ham were enjoying plenty of possession and had four substitutes left to deploy. And so, with a European final at stake and the climax approaching, the world eagerly awaited David Moyes’s next move.

As it turned out, Moyes’s next move was to attack a ball boy and get himself sent off. So close. The margins in this game, and all that. And although this tie was probably already gone by the time he was slinking down the tunnel, the angry veins in his temples finally receding, the departure of the West Ham manager felt like a bizarrely fitting epilogue to this semi-final, one that began in east London in a bouquet of bubbles and euphoria, and ended on the banks of the River Main in ignominy and anticlimax.

It was fitting because it encapsulated just how comprehensively the Bundesliga underdogs had managed to mess with West Ham’s heads, to force them from their comfort zone, to take them to new and frightening places. Amid a torrent of noise, a menacing undercurrent of fan violence and one of the biggest occasions in the club’s history, West Ham froze and faltered and finally flipped. Forced to live on their wits, to find new solutions on the fly, there would be no Plan B: just a depleted and slightly weary Plan A.

This was as true in the first leg as it was here. On paper, West Ham had the players and the pedigree to prevail. But as the pressure grew, they shrunk. The reasons for this feel partly physical, partly mental and partly tactical. A team operating on simple, well-drilled patterns – the switch to the wingers, the quick ball into Michail Antonio, the set piece – was unable to adapt