New role emerges for West Ham's french phenom

Mohamadou Kanté's development at West Ham has been one of the more interesting storylines so far this season, and the pattern is now hard to ignore: give him space in front of him and a licence to run into it, and he looks like one of the best players on the pitch. Ask him to operate deeper, in a conventional midfield role facing his own goal, and a lot of what makes him dangerous simply disappears.

Kanté's best moments this season have all come with him facing forward, attacking space rather than building play from deep. Against Portsmouth in the Carabao Cup, he turned Regan Poole inside out before rolling the ball across for Castellanos to open the scoring. Against Burnley, he barrelled down the left to tee up Manor Solomon. And in the 6-0 thrashing of Wrexham, he came off the bench and broke the offside trap to latch onto a sublime Manor Solomon ball over the top, controlling it on the run before smashing it past the goalkeeper for West Ham's fifth. Three different moments, three different phases of the season, and the common thread is identical: Kanté with the ball at his feet and grass in front of him.

The flip side of that pattern has been just as visible. Against Charlton earlier in the season, with the visitors sitting deep and inviting West Ham to build patiently, Kanté visibly struggled. The game simply didn't offer him the space to do the thing that makes him effective. It's a small sample, but it lines up with a broader footballing truth about players of his profile: some players create in tight spaces, others need room to accelerate into. Kanté is emphatically the latter.