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West Ham United are outstanding. Insofar as they stand out from the other clubs in the Premier League's bottom five by not having sacked their manager this season yet. It hardly strengthens Sam Allardyce's job security that the team in last place, Sunderland, outplayed his side for long periods before having to settle for a goalless draw, but West Ham's owners retain faith in the manager even if they have dismissed their pre-season ambition of improving on last term's 10th place.
West Ham invested £20m in the England forward Andy Carroll and Stewart Downing from Liverpool in the summer in a bid to move up but the aim now is to avoid going down.
With Carroll yet to play this season and the club uncertain when he will return to action, and Downing and the centre-back Winston Reid among several other important players injured, the club's co-chairman, David Sullivan, has described this season as "a write-off".
Relegation would be ruinous for a club that needs to clear debts of around £70m before completing their planned move to the Olympic Stadium in 2016.
"He's in a position where he gets extremely anxious about the situation," said Allardyce of Sullivan. "That's the way he is as a person. The pressure comes on him as much as it comes on me and everybody else and dealing with the pressure is something that we've all got to be capable of.
"The commitment going forward is a big responsibility for us all, especially them [Sullivan and David Gold] as the owners, because going into the new stadium this club has to be in the Premier League. So we have to make sure we have a team that is capable of staying there. At the moment we're not quite there but I think that's down to the injured players. Once we get them back and ready we'll be OK. We have to get them fit and do what we can until then or until we get new ones in."
West Ham's best player on Saturday was their goalkeeper Jussi Jaaskelainen, who tipped a 30-yard drive by the Sunderland right-back Phil Bardsley on to the bar in the closest that either side came to a goal. He also saved other decent efforts from Lee Cattermole and Fabio Borini. He is one of the reasons that West Ham have managed to keep eight clean sheets this season.
It is at the other end of the field that reinforcements are urgently needed by West Ham. "We all know that the goal factor is the problem for us and we would be higher up the league if we could score more," Allardyce said. ''Creative players were on the field against Sunderland but they didn't play at their creative best."
He said that West Ham hope to be active early in the January transfer window. "We are talking with a club and a player's agent to see whether they are going to join us or not," he said.
"It's an attacking player. We're trying to do the deals as quick as we possibly can. David Sullivan is the quickest owner of a football club that I've ever had. He doesn't 'ooh, ahh and um', like most of the other owners I've been involved with."
Man of match: Ki Sung-yueng (Sunderland)
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