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As West Ham prepare to host Stoke, the club that brought him to English football five years ago, Arnautovic is one of the league’s in-form players

A few years ago, Marko Arnautovic was asked in an interview which coaches had enjoyed the biggest influence on his career, and alongside the Werder Bremen legend Thomas Schaaf and Jose Mourinho, who managed Arnautovic at Inter Milan, there was a more surprising name.

When Steve McClaren arrived at Twente in the summer of 2008, Arnautovic was a wayward young striker on the fringes of the first team, looking for a way out. Over the following year, however, he would strike up an unlikely rapport with a manager whose achievements in Dutch football – Eredivisie runners-up and champions in his first two seasons – remain, in this country at least, curiously underrated.

McClaren threw the teenage Arnautovic into the first team, gave him licence to run riot, was prepared to offer him an arm around the shoulder as well as a rocket up the backside, and was rewarded with 14 goals – a tally that, almost a decade on, Arnautovic is yet to surpass. “Steve started my career, really,” Arnautovic would later say. “He gave me the opportunity to play from the start and show myself. I like him as a man and as a coach.”

The true value of McClaren would only really become apparent over the subsequent years, as Arnautovic wandered around Europe, showing only glimpses of the potential he had displayed at Twente. Until – perhaps – now. As West Ham prepare to host Stoke, the club that brought him to English football five years ago, Arnautovic is one of the Premier League’s in-form players, his nine goals in 14 games a tribute not simply to his own toil but that of another much-maligned British manager: David Moyes.