THERE ARE MOMENTS IN LIFE WHEN YOU SHOULD GET OFF THE HAMSTER WHEEL AND TAKE A MINUTE TO CONSIDER HOW THINGS ARE GOING. THIS IS ONE OF THOSE MOMENTS.

The £7m signing of Dean Ashton last week could perhaps be perceived as the club having turned a very dark corner, back into daylight. Relegation from the Premiership at the end of the 2002-03 season still smarts and the wholesale departures which swiftly followed left all but the most optimistic Hammer worrying how the club would ever get back on its feet.

By November of the first season in football’s second tier, West Ham was under its third manager. Gone was Glenn Roeder, who had started the campaign at the helm, Trevor Brooking had then had to act as temporary successor while Alan Pardew sat out his  ‘gardening leave’ from Reading, before being allowed to officially take the reins on October 22, 2003.

I’m sure Alan will thank me for reminding everybody, but he had to wait until his eighth game in charge before recording a first win as West Ham manager, the 4-0 drubbing of Wigan on November 29 featuring a two-goal contribution from a striker making his home debut, Marlon Harewood.

There were to be just two more league wins by the time West Ham prepared to travel to Premiership Wolves for the Fourth Round of the FA Cup. On January 25, 2004, the club sat in eighth place in the First Division, four points outside the playoff places. A 3-1 win at Molineux, followed by a 2-1 home win over Rotherham in the league, gave some hope that things were finally coming together, but the news on transfer deadline day, 2004, took the wind out of everybody’s sails.

It was announced that Jermain Defoe, the Irons’ leading scorer with 15 goals in 22 games, was to pack his bags for Tottenham. The fee was £7m plus a player, a Mr Robert Zamora, who would make the return journey to the team he had supported all his life.

The only real surprise was that Defoe hadn’t left earlier, having handed in a transfer request almost at the sound of the final whistle at St Andrews, after the draw with Birmingham that had confirmed West Ham’s relegation. So it was in January 2004 that he became the 16th player to leave the club since it had slipped out of the Premiership, a period in which West Ham had accepted £27.6m in transfer fees.

It was, for me, the lowest point of a love affair (sorry, the love affair) that had begun 31 years earlier, when a 10-year-old version of  Jim Munro had attempted to steal a glance of the Upton Park turf between tightly packed bodies as West Ham beat Chelsea 3-1 on January 27, 1973.

January 2004 felt like the point of no return. The talent had gone, even the playoff places seemed out of reach and, to cap it all, a certain team in west London had gone from being £80m in debt to having a billionaire benefactor bail them out overnight. Where was the justice?

Just two years on from that all-time low, fortune could not be hiding less if it tried. Not only is the club proudly reinstalled into the best division in Europe, the team is playing wonderful football, marvellous Marlon Harewood and Bobby ‘the Z-man’ Zamora are banging in the goals, but the defining moment came with the signing of Ashton this week.

Defoe departed for £7m in 2004 and we wondered if West Ham would ever see that sort of money again. Just two years later, the club has invested exactly that amount in replacing its lost gem with an almost Identikit version.

When Defoe left, he was 21, an England Under-21 international who had scored 47 goals in 122 league games for West Ham and on loan at Bournemouth. Ashton, 22, arrives having also represented England at Under-21 level and with a goal tally of 78 in 202 league games for Crewe and Norwich. If you get your calculators out, you’ll find that both players have an identical strike rate of 0.39 goals per game, or, in sensible terms, have scored two goals for every five matches played.

It is a deal that perhaps may not have caused the headlines of a Wright-Phillips or a Rooney, but for West Ham, it means so much that it is priceless.