Betting.Betfair

They've gone down, there's in-fighting at the club's annual dinner and the club are £80m in debt but a long list of men are lined up for the manager role at Upton Park. Chris Hughton heads the list of West Ham suitors in the early trading on Betfair's next manager market. The former Newcastle boss, so harshly sacked in mid-season by Mike Ashley, is the 3.0 favourite to take the reins at Upton Park following Avram Grant's Sunday afternoon sacking in the DW Stadium tunnel. In volatile trading, Hughton has been backed at a low of 2.12 from an early high of 6.2 before settling at his current level. Possessing promotion winning experience at Championship level with a thin Newcastle United squad in 2009-10, and not currently employed in football, Hughton looks ideally placed to take...

If Martin O'Neill does join West Ham United in the coming days it will be a welcome return to the Premier League for one of the game's more colourful characters, but such an appointment would beggar the question, what on earth is he is thinking? This is a man, after all, who four years ago was interviewed for the England job, only to lose out to Steve McClaren, presumably because the FA, as they did when overlooking Brian Clough in 1977, feared that they might be dealing with too much of a loose cannon for their tastes. Since then, O'Neill worked wonders with Aston Villa, guiding them to 11th place in his first season (five better than the previous year) and sixth place in his subsequent three, improving his side's points tally year on year and narrowly missing out on Champions League...

Saturday was not a great day. It began when I woke up early, put on the telly, and saw the cricket score. Having written that Australia couldn't possibly take 20 wickets, and backed my belief with hard cash by laying the Aussies for the Perth Test,[b] Mitchell Johnson[/b] had turned the whole Ashes series on its head. What's more, I'd broken one of my normal golden rules of gambling and not "gone green" when I had the opportunity 24 hours earlier. Next I spent five hours stuck in snow on the M5. I was two miles from the next junction when I heard that Birmingham's game with Newcastle was off, and it took forever before I could get there and turn round to go back home again. The wait wasn't helped, as a boyhood[b] West Ham[/b] fan, by listening to them struggling along at Blackburn. I...