West Ham 2 Stoke City 1

The win was a welcome relief to the Irons' fans, who must have feared the worst after their side fell behind in just the fourth minute when Abdoulaye Faye powered home a header after he lost his marker James Collins at a corner.

And the Hammers toiled without reward for the rest of the first half against a resolute and committed Stoke team, who looked comfortable containing the home side's limited attacking threat and deservedly went into the break 1-0 ahead.

But the compexion of the match changed within 10 minutes of the restart.

Firstly Cole pounced on a defensive error by Andy Griffin to curl the ball home from inside the box to level the scores on 51 minutes

And Griffin's mistake immeditately led to a confrontation between him and his team-mate Ricardo Fuller, which saw the big forward slap his captain's face and inevitably be shown the red card by referee Michael Jones two minutes later.

The sending-off seemed to rattle the visitors and inspire West Ham but the home side could not turn their numerical advantage into goals despite some determined attacking.

Luis Boa Morte, who had his best game for the club for some time, had the Hammers' best chance in the 68th minute but he shot weakly from just six yards out and the ball was cleared off the line.

Stoke were very physical and employed some obvious time-wasting tactics in the hope of taking at least a point from the Boleyn Ground, and the referee seemed happy to allow this, despite his keeness to flourish the cards throughout the game for many apparently innocuous challenges.

But Stoke's timewasting ultimately proved their undoing as Tristan's late goal left them too little time to force an equaliser and it was the home fans who headed into the New Year happy with their side's Christmas results.

Defender Collins admitted the Hammers had to dig deep to get a result against the Premier League new boys.

He said: “Yes, the first half was not nice. We knew exactly what they were going to do and we didn’t really deal with is as well as we would have liked.

"But second half we got to grips with it and I think we came out with the right result.

“Deep down we all knew we weren’t performing. We were getting forward and not really creating anything so we knew not to go out in the second half and start playing a long ball game.

"We knew if we kept it on the floor we’d eventually create chances and get the goals and luckily that’s what we did.

“It was my fault for the goal. I’d like to blame it on being a bit rusty but it was just poor play from me really, I lost my man. Luckily the boys dug me out of the hole and we got the result.�

And with two wins from three over Christmas the players have finished 2008 on a pleasing note, sitting in 10th place in the Premier League.

Said Collins: “Yeah. Obviously we said if you put a run of wins together it would put us up the league and that’s put us up to 10th today.

"We’ve got a bit of a break off the league next week so we’re in a good spot going into the next game.�

West Ham: Green, Faubert, Ilunga, Upson, Collins, Parker (Mullins, 77), Boa Morte, Behrami, Collison (Tristan, 77), Cole, Di Michele (Spector, 89). Unused subs: Lastuvka, Bowyer, Sears, N'Gala.

Goals: Cole 51, Tristan 88.

Booked: Cole, Boa Morte, Di Michele.

Stoke: Sorensen, Griffin (Davies, 58), Higginbotham, Olofinjana, Whelan, Cresswell, Fuller, Pugh (Pericard, 52), Shawcross, Delap, Faye. Unused subs: Simonsen, Lawrence, Soares, Tonge, Sonko.

Goals: Faye 4.

Booked: Higginbotham, Olofinjana, Faye.

Sent off: Fuller.

Attendance: 34,477

Referee: Michael Jones.