West Ham vs Manchester United: Slaven Bilic awaits final Upton Park roar before crucial United clash

Hammers will end their 112 years at the Boleyn Ground with a match against United

Slaven Bilic will miss the vociferous Upton Park atmosphere (Getty)

For Slaven Bilic and Mark Noble, at the very least, the most touching moment of Tuesday night will be just before 7.45pm. West Ham United will end their 112 years at the Boleyn Ground with a match against Manchester United, which will be followed by an emotive light-show. Everyone has their own memories of the ground, their own favourite moment or place, but for both West Ham manager and captain, it is the final few seconds just before the game starts that means the most.

West Ham may well try to create the same effect at the Olympic Stadium but it can only ever be a copy, never quite the same. The pregnant pause before Mike Dean blows his whistle will be the last.

Mark Noble was asked early on Monday morning what part of the match-day experience he treasures the most. “Probably the 10 seconds before kick-off, when the music plays and the whole crowd sings ‘Bubbles’. Then they switch the music off. It’s probably my favourite part of the day. Everything else is stressful, phone calls about tickets and press officers. But that 10 seconds when they switch the music off, everyone sings, and the whistle goes, you can just concentrate on football.”

After Noble’s press conference he was replaced by Bilic, who made precisely the same point. “What I am going to miss is when you have that roar, in the last few seconds before kick-off, when the bubbles stop and everything stops,” Bilic said. “That five seconds between the music and the kick-off. You are there, suddenly it is kind of quiet, but you feel ‘ok, now it starts, it is serious.’ You have it at every stadium, but it is the best at Upton Park.”

But once the whistle goes tonight West Ham will have a game to win, and they must handle the emotions better than they did on Saturday. Then, facing a Swansea team with nothing to play for, they did not show up and were beaten 4-1. Had they won they would still be in the hunt for fourth place, hoping for a Manchester City slip-up on Sunday.

Noble explained on Monday, very plausibly, that there has been so much attention on Tuesday’s game against Manchester United that the penultimate home game – initially scheduled to be the last one – struggled to command enough of everyone’s attentions.

“If I am really honest, I thought the atmosphere on Saturday was a little bit strange, but only because we have this game on Tuesday night,” Noble admitted. “Swansea, from the start of the season, was always billed as the last ever at the Boleyn, and then things change. All of a sudden, we are playing Manchester United and no disrespect to Swansea City, it becomes a bit of a glamour fixture. The fans are really looking forward to tomorrow night, instead of Saturday. I am not saying it made the result the way it did, it didn’t. But I am sure Tuesday will be the special one.”

Noble battles with Bony for the ball during West Ham's defeat by Swansea (Getty)

The difficulty for Bilic and the players is to make sure that the occasion does not get to them. They could not have picked a better opponent for it, in terms of profile, and United are just two positions ahead of them in the table. No human set of footballers could fully detach themselves from the emotions that will be there on Tuesday.

“It would be impossible,” Bilic shrugged. “It would be big anyway, even if the game didn’t mean a lot to us or to Man United in the sense of the season. It would be big because it’s the last game at Upton Park. It is massive, it could not be bigger. The players will be emotional even if one of those things was involved, but there are two. But there is nothing wrong with being emotional.”

West Ham will become the tenants of the Olympic stadium on 99-year lease (Getty)

One of Bilic’s great talents as a coach is the marshalling of emotion and he will certainly be working hard to keep his players in the right frame of mind. West Ham had a big FA Cup game Manchester United one month ago and Bilic now admits they went in with the wrong mindset. “We approached that game in a way that was very hard to stop, in a too optimistic way. The whole set-up before the game, it was ‘we are going to beat you’, and we attacked them on a big space individually. United are good at stretching you and keeping the ball, you have to be compact against them. That gives them more than enough opportunities to hurt you, and they did exactly that.”

Then when Mike Dean blows his whistle again around 9.30pm it will all be over. West Ham are urging supporters not to go onto the pitch so as not to disrupt the post-match spectacular they have planned. “It’s very important, you want this all to go smoothly,” co-chairman David Gold said. “There are health and safety issues, there are security issues, and we want this all to go smoothly. This is a momentous moment in the history of the football club. We are going to have the whole football world watching this event.”

But for many of those there, especially those such as Gold and Noble, owner and captain, who grew up as local boys and West Ham fans, it will be a difficult evening. In an era when clubs are increasingly detached from their communities, there is a local-ness about West Ham which is worth keeping hold of. Noble and Gold have both been coming to the Boleyn Ground for their whole footballing lives.

Noble used to be a ball-boy there. “I used to get hammered from the Chicken Run,” he remembered. “I used to watch the game rather than concentrate and get the ball back. That is when I realised what the Chicken Run was all about.” Noble has been coming to West Ham since the 1990s, Gold, who grew up on Green Street itself, for much long than that. But Tuesday, for those two and for tens of thousands of other east Londoners, will be the last time.