The curious events of Dimitri Payet...

Here's my take on Payet so far at West Ham.

1) West Ham bought Payet to play a central role, because his figures last season at Marseille were exceptionally good.

2) The owners were maybe thinking of the good form with the diamond last season, and wanted to recreate it.

3) Unfortunately the diamond is a very narrow and weak formation. It's a novelty tactic, basically. It was wretched in pre-season.

4) And Payet at Marseille played a tactically bizarre formation last season (3-3-3-1?) that would be almost unthinkable to try and recreate at West Ham. Maybe there was a thought to bring Bielsa in to try it, but it didn't happen.

4) This left Bilic with a quandary - a player bought to be the key central attacking player in the team, but with a struggle to realistically play him in the same role in the hustle and bustle of the Prem.

5) Bilic fended off talk of formations in interview, saying that it wasn't too important where the players played, that he was going to try to be flexible. Alarm bells for me! This was an incredibly naive set of ideas from Bilic imo.

5) Bilic's ultimate answer was the Christmas tree formation, which you'd struggle to find any team in Europe playing. It was presumably the only way he could find to get Payet and Zarate in central roles together. In practice it seemed to be designed to be very flexible, with Zarate and Payet basically going where they wanted with little defensive responsibility.

6) The formation worked inexplicably well at Arsenal, where Wenger's refusal to try and exploit our weakness on the flanks was noted by many pundits. It was an odd game.

7) The formation then worked incredibly badly in two games at home. As all have noted the narrow formation worked terribly against 4-4-2 oppositions, the full-backs cruelly exposed, and players pulled all over the place to plug the gaps. The desire to accomodate Payet and Zarate centrally essentially threw those games imo.

8) Bilic had to admit defeat and picked Payet to play wide today in a very orthodox 4-5-1. And that has resulted in one of the finest away performances in recent memory (3-0 away at Liverpool).

I think that's the story of our season so far. The idea is to get Payet to be our star player in a central role, but in practice this is proving very difficult to do. I think it totally explains our odd set of results so far.

What I don't know is what happens going forward.