The first West Ham player to score ten Premier League goals since Diafra Sakho during the 2014/15 campaign, there’s little debating the impact Marko Arnautovic’s had in east London after starting his Hammers career with a 13-game scoreless run.

The Austrian international has increasingly embraced the historic role of West Ham’s maverick attacker, following on from the likes of Paolo Di Canio and Dimitri Payet, and after scoring against Arsenal on Sunday needs just three more strikes to produce their best individual scoring tally for a single season since returning to the Premier League.

At this point, it’s clear that the Irons need to start reconstructing the team around their top scorer when the transfer window opens in the summer, regardless of whether David Moyes or someone else is given the managerial role full-time.

He’s shown he can be the Irons’ talismanic presence, the man who inspires impressive results against big teams and gets the Hammers over the line in important games.

It may seem counter-intuitive then, to suggest that centre-forward may not be Arnautovic’s most beneficial position and the one the club should start building around, considering how potent he’s been since first occupying it under David Moyes. He’s shown a fantastic knack for bringing the team up the pitch and creating something out of nothing with very little support in the final third.

But the alternative perspective is how the Austrian international could be even more devastating with a natural centre-forward to play off, rather than having to hold up the ball and do the dirty work himself.

Although Arnautovic has shown fantastic maturity to embrace that part of the game this season, it’s not part of his natural forte and that really showed at times in the 4-1 defeat to Arsenal – asked to create problems single handed, he won just a single header and lost possession 14 times.

So, West Ham fans, do you see Arnautovic as a centre-forward, should he be playing as a support striker behind a focal point or return to the wide role that served him well at Stoke City? Let us know where you want to see the versatile attacker – who Transfermarkt value at £16.2million – playing next season by voting below…

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