West Ham United captain Jarrod Bowen added another individual accolade to his collection on Thursday lunchtime, some 48 hours before Saturday’s 3pm kick-off at home to Southampton.

Specifically, the skipper takes home the PFA Fans Player of the Month award for September. A couple of weeks after Nuno Espirito Santo and Konstantinos Mavropanos were crowned the Championship’s Player and Manager of the Month by a three-man panel of pundits and ex-pros, Jarrod Bowen was selected by the fans following an impressive run of four goals and two assists in five league matches.

Nuno and Mavropanos became the first West Ham United duo to perform the Manager and Player double-act since Sam Allardyce and Diafra Sakho in 2014.

Bowen, meanwhile, ends a decade-long wait for a West Ham winner of the PFA Fans award. An award no Hammer has claimed since Dimitri Payet in February 2016.

West Ham United captain Jarrod Bowen named PFA Championship Player of the Month

While Bowen got the gong on the back of exhilarating performances against Wolves, Wrexham and Bolton Wanderers – he scored twice against the first, one against the second, and the winner away at the latter – Payet was selected after helping Slaven Bilic’s side remain in contention for Champions League qualification ten years previously.

The mercurial Frenchman finished top of the voting that month, narrowly ahead of West Ham teammate Mark Noble and then-Tottenham playmaker Christian Eriksen. Others in contention were Chelsea duo Cesc Fabregas and Diego Costa, a prime Jamie Vardy, and an Everton-era Ross Barkley.

A decade on, Bowen, shaking hands with former Hammer Paul Allen as he claims what he hopes will be the first of a few pieces of silverware this term, finally lands an award he was nominated for as far back as 2019, while still a Hull City player.

Bowen played his part in Swansea triumph and Payet still loves the Hammers

West Ham are on track to be the Championship’s greatest-ever goalscoring side, following 30 goals in their first eleven matches. Bowen has six of those, though it was a brilliant rearguard performance which snatched three points off Swansea City last time out.

“If you want to be dominant and do well this season, you have to have all sorts of wins,” Bowen said, drawing a blank in South Wales after a fine solo effort against QPR and three goal contributions at Lincoln City.

“It’s not going to be pretty every single week, it’s not going to be perfect. There’s going to be times when we’re below our levels – and we probably weren’t at our highest level [at Swansea] and we’ve come away with a 1-0 result so that’s all anyone is going to remember.”

It would perhaps be unfair, though, to suggest that ‘all anyone is going to remember’ about Dimitri Payet was the nature of his departure. A highly-contentious move to Marseille in 2017 ensured that Payet would forever be known as ‘Le Snake’ among sections of the support.

But it appears that Payet still has fond memories of his time at Upton Park, even if their memories of him have been tainted. And so he should. That is where he played the best football of an occasionally-brilliant, often-exasperating career, after all.

“It was a dream to play for West Ham, even if I stayed just two years! To play for West Ham just one minute, it’s a dream,” fellow Frenchman and one-time Hammers defender Sebastien Schemmel told West Ham Unofficial recently.

“I spoke with Payet three months ago. I said to him; ‘What is the best club you played [for]?’ He said West Ham.”