Adrian Chiles has been contemplating his beloved West Bromwich Albion’s seemingly inevitable relegation from the Premier League, trying to explain what it all means in the context of football tribalism in the region and picturing the nightmare scenario that would deliver a few more painful blows.
“There was a famous year when we overhauled Wolves after being 11 points behind them and ended up getting promoted to the Premier League and they didn’t,” Chiles says, referring to the 2001-02 season. “I remember [the former Led Zeppelin singer] Robert Plant saying at the time that as a Wolves fan he didn’t dare go out unless it was under cover of night. Well, I think we’re feeling exactly the same way now. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. And don’t forget we’re facing the perfect storm, where Wolves have gone up, Villa could go up and Middlesbrough, managed by [Tony] Pulis, could go up as well. Then we’d have a triple kick in the Niagaras, as Gary Megson might have called it.”
For Albion, who have been flying the Premier League flag for the West Midlands for two seasons, a chastening return to the Championship beckons. Despite Darren Moore’s best attempts to breathe new life into the club since replacing Alan Pardew, Albion’s fate is all but sealed as they travel to Newcastle on Saturday eight points adrift of safety with three matches remaining.
It has been such a miserable season, delivering two victories in the past 33 league games and an endless flow of bad news, that it is tempting to think dropping down a division may be no bad thing in the short term if it gives fans the chance to rediscover the joy of watching their team win again.
Chiles is the wrong person to try to convince with that argument. “I was at QPR in April 1986, when we got relegated. Everybody was sure we would come straight back up. I was just going off to university at the time, aged 19. By the time we got back in the top flight I was 35 and half a lifetime had gone by. So there are no guarantees.”
Although Albion won promotion four times in nine seasons before this stint in the top flight, the difference between then and now is that the club was geared up for that yo-yo existence a decade ago. After seven successive years in the Premier League, no one was thinking about Championship football, especially after finishing last summer’s transfer window with the division’s fifth-highest net spend.
“I’ve seen very bad seasons,” reflects Norman Bartlam, a local historian who has been following Albion for 50 years. “The Don Howe and Ron Saunders eras were just awful but in a way we grew to accept it because we expected bad things. But this season we didn’t. We thought we were established in the Premier League. So it’s come as a real shock.”
Bartlam lays the blame largely at the door of the Albion hierarchy. “The inertia in the board – the club just froze and didn’t do anything about it. Those of us on the terraces were screaming: ‘Get rid of Pulis.’ Then we were screaming: ‘Don’t get Pardew.’ And then within three games of having Pardew, we were screaming: ‘Get rid of Pardew.’ The board were just like rabbits in the headlights. What was really shocking for me as well was seeing the players drained not just of confidence but interest.”
Albion’s decision to sack Pulis still fuels an ill-informed debate outside of the Hawthorns, namely that getting rid of a man who had never been relegated was their biggest mistake. It is an argument that overlooks the fact Albion had won two of their previous 21 league matches – Pulis’s worst run of results for 13 years – and just how fed up supporters were with the style of football. On top of that, Pulis, as anyone who sat through his final two press conferences will tell you, looked and sounded as if he wanted to be out the door.
“I like Tony and I thought he was right for us at the time,” Chiles says. “I interviewed him last season and he could not have been more positive about the club’s future. But something started going wrong at the end of last season and had gone completely wrong by the time we played Huddersfield away [in early November]. When the entire away support has turned against you, your days are numbered. Something had stopped working and, I must say, that’s partly a problem when you’ve got an absentee owner.
“We’ll see what he [Guochuan Lai] is made of now. I don’t judge him at all. He seems like a good guy and he’s put money in the club. But if you’re not smelling the same air as the fans, if you’re not at the games week in and week out, you can’t really know what’s going on. And from where he was sitting, it might have seemed premature to get rid of the ‘dead cert’ Pulis. But I promise you, if he’d made the journey to Huddersfield, he would have known that Tony had to go then.”
As for Pardew, the local Express & Star probably summed it up best when it wrote he is “destined to go down as one of the worst managers in Albion’s history, if not the worst”.
Pardew’s appointment was nothing short of a disaster, contributed to three board members being sacked, and will be forever remembered for the ill-fated trip to Barcelona that led to four senior players – Gareth Barry, Jonny Evans, Jake Livermore and Boaz Myhill – breaking a curfew and allegedly stealing a taxi.
“That shows how much respect they had for that manager – and that showed on the pitch,” says Ally Robertson, who played more than 500 games for Albion. “Now Darren has come in, he’s Albion through and through, the loveliest lad you could wish to meet, and you can see the players wanting to win. I’m just hoping we can get some respect back in the last few games and build for next season.”
Rebuilding will be far from easy. Ben Foster and Chris Brunt, two stalwarts, have pledged their future but many others will depart in pursuit of the Premier League football they signed up for and, in other cases, to enable the club to recoup some money. There is also the not-so-small matter of identifying a new manager and, with all that in mind, it feels like a curious decision to appoint Giuliano Terraneo, a 64-year-old Italian who has never worked in English football before, as technical consultant.
Whether that works or not, Albion know that the balance of power has shifted in the West Midlands for a season at least and that few people other than Albion fans will lose any sleep over it.
“It pains me to say this,” Chiles adds, “but in terms of the impact on the community and the area, if Villa and Wolves end up going up, that fills the credibility gap that we’ve left behind.”
