Blow for West Ham with Pedro Obiang set to miss rest of the season with ankle injury

Incident | Obiang receives treatment from the medical team during the match between West Ham and Leicester City
Michael Regan/Getty Images
Ken Dyer20 March 2017

West Ham suffered a major blow with the news that Pedro Obiang is likely to miss the rest of the season through injury.

The midfielder, who was on the verge on being awarded a new deal after impressing this season, suffered a significant ankle injury during the second half of West Ham’s 3-2 defeat against Leicester and was due to undergo a scan to assess the extent of the damage.

Obiang, signed from Sampdoria last summer, took time to tie down a regular spot in West Ham’s team but has this season been one of the successes in what has been a largely difficult time for Slaven Bilic’s squad.

There was even more bad news for the manager, whose team have won just one match in their last seven, with Michail Antonio suffering a hamstring strain near the end of the Leicester match, which could rule him out for up to a month.

Antonio was not replaced by England today after withdrawing from the squad for the matches against Germany and Lithuania, while central defender Winston Reid has also been forced to drop out of the New Zealand squad after picking up a thigh problem. The injuries, on the back of the defeat by Leicester, only serve to increase the pressure on Bilic, especially after club co-chairman David Sullivan, for the second week in succession, warned that there must be an improvement in what remains of the season.

Only Bournemouth, Hull and Swansea have conceded more Premier League goals than West Ham this season and Sullivan said: “We have to find out why we are conceding so many goals and fix it.

“The next few games now become vital. We go to Hull, then to Arsenal before we welcome Swansea.”

In Pictures | West Ham vs Leicester City | 18/03/17

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West Ham found themselves two goals down after eight minutes against Leicester and full-back Sam Byram agrees that is not good enough.

“We turned it around in the second half and were unfortunate not to get anything from the game,” he said. “But it has happened too many times when we have started slowly.

“It was a lack of concentration from us but it is really frustrating that we didn’t get anything from the game.

“We need points on the board so it is frustrating to have two weeks to the next game. I would want to play sooner so we can put it right.”

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