During his decade-long tenure at West Ham United, Michail Antonio’s time at the club was defined by versatility, resilience and a willingness to do whatever was required for the team.
The Jamaica international would eventually settle up top, but for all his shifting around the pitch, there was one position that he never embraced.
That came when Antonio was required to fill in at right-back, a spell which was followed by a dressing room row, a managerial change and the eventual move up front.
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Antonio on his ill-fated right-back stint
“All the right-backs had got injured, it was just me,” Antonio recalls to FourFourTwo. “I did well, I think I got seven goals from right-back and a few assists, I had a couple of clubs looking at me. Antonio Conte wanted me at Chelsea, he was looking at me as a wing-back, the same as Victor Moses, but nothing came to fruition."
But despite these early successes in defence, it was not a role he enjoyed.
“I hated playing there, though,” he admits. “Coming back for pre-season at West Ham, I was thinking, ‘All right, we’re going to sign some right-backs’, but Slaven Bilic did the opposite – he sold the right-backs, thinking I was going to play there!
“He told me, “I’m going to make you the best right-back in Europe”, but I was like, “I don’t want to be, I’d rather be an average Premier League winger. He said, “Trust me”, but there was a game at Chelsea, I tried to lift the ball over Eden Hazard to pass it out wide, they blocked it and I gave up a penalty.
“Slaven pulled me up about it – after the game, I went in and he was saying, 'If I need you to play somewhere, you play there!' I said, “'’ll never play there again, I don’t want to play in that position ever again!' Mark Noble started arguing with me, so I stormed out of the changing room and got a taxi home.”
Antonio soon began to move into a more advanced role, as he went from a classic right winger to a traditional centre-forward role.
“That was Manuel Pellegrini,” he continues. “We were struggling, and I think I’d just come back from injury. The manager went from 4-5-1 to 4-4-2, with me and Seb Haller up top. Then, when Seb wasn’t playing the best because we weren’t playing to his style, he threw me up there.
“I played four games up front and did well. When Pellegrini got sacked, David Moyes came in and that was me, I was the number nine from then on.”
During this time West Ham had a habit of signing underwhelming big-name strikers, only for Antonio to see them off, amid talk of a curse on the number nine shirt.
“That’s exactly what it was before I moved up front,” he adds. “Every striker came in and didn’t score much, then I went from winger to striker. I think because I was already at the club, the curse didn’t get me!”
Michail Antonio’s autobiography 'Humans Not Robots', published by HarperCollins, is available now
