Injury-hit Hammers will not splash out

Return: Lee Bowyer could be back soon

West Ham will not invest heavily in the January transfer market despite an injury crisis which saw 14 senior players missing by the end of their 2-0 defeat at Arsenal.

Alan Curbishley had two teenagers, defender James Tomkins and midfielder James Collison, on the bench for the match at Emirates Stadium, but the manager has no immediate plans to bring in new players.

Curbishley said: "We will have to see what happens. If it gets really acute, we will have to start thinking about it."

West Ham did spend heavily a year ago, splashing out around £16million on new signings in January but they were in serious danger of going down then.

New chairman Bjorgolfur Gudmundsson believes the club have a big enough squad and Curbishley says the position will ease when at least some of his injured players return.

Curbishley hopes to have midfield pair Matthew Etherington and Lee Bowyer available for Saturday's FA Cup third-round tie against Manchester City although he will be without Freddie Ljungberg, who limped off with hamstring trouble in the first half against his former club.

The boss is on the lookout for a lone striker signing, though, while players such as Nigel Quashie and Calum Davenport could go during the next month.

West Ham's England Under-21 midfielder Mark Noble, who has just returned from injury himself, admitted it was an uphill task after conceding two goals to Arsenal in the opening 20 minutes.

"We really fancied we could get something from the match but giving away two early sloppy goals meant it was hard work for us after that," he said. "We ran ourselves into the ground just keeping it at 2-0 but we thought that, if we could just nick a goal, we would have a chance.

"The injury situation is desperate and to lose two big players like Scott Parker and Nobby Solano after the Manchester United game was a really big blow."

Noble also believes the Premier League title race will go right down to the wire.

"We've played United and Arsenal in our last two matches and it's hard to pick an eventual title winner out of those two," he said. I think it's going to be an exciting title race this season."

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in