WEST Bromwich Albion supporters know all about top-flight relegation battles. In each of 1901, 1904, 1927, 1938, 1973, 1986, 2003, 2006, 2009 and 2018 the club went down. The odds still are that they will add the year we call 2021 to that long, sad list to take it to 11 relegations and move just one behind the record holders, nearby Birmingham City. Is there something in the West Midlands' air that brings on relegation? Even scientists would have to suspect that the answer is: yes.
But if you need to fight both relegation and the science of relegation then why not bring in Sam Allardyce. The man who, in the Premier League at least, has never taken a team down. That proud record is heavily under threat now with seven games to go, but the extraordinary win at Chelsea two weekends ago and then Monday’s victory against Southampton has given the club… something. Is it hope? Is it a crazy dream? Is it even realistic? Possibly. Probably not. But maybe…
There have been numerous “great escapes” in Premier League history, technically defined as a team who stayed up when more than 68% of pundits declared they were “dead and buried”, but they can vary in style and substance quite a bit. There are the teams who had too much quality to even be down there, say West Ham in 2006-07, or the teams clearly powered by the supernatural strength that comes from respectfully relocating the skeleton of a fallen Plantagenet king, say Leicester in 2014-15. But West Brom in 2004-05, a full decade before Nigel Pearson and Richard III combined so effectively? Well they may just be the lowest quality surprise survivors the Premier League has ever seen. They did so with six wins all season, one fewer than two of the three teams below them who went down beneath them. A total of 34 or more points has been enough to relegate 27 Premier League teams in the past, including both Watford and Bournemouth last season. It kept Bryan Robson’s Baggies up.
#OnThisDay in 2005, @WBA completed one of the greatest escapes ever seen in the #PL pic.twitter.com/OoUbYKVmQM
— Premier League (@premierleague) May 15, 2017
At the time no-one gave WBA a chance of staying up, partly because they weren’t very good and partly because they had been bottom of the Premier League at Christmas. In one of the first modern sightings of the creation of viral football knowledge, it was revealed that season that no team had stayed up from this festive position since the creation of the league in 1992.
Everything was stacked against West Brom but a 2-0 win against Portsmouth on the final day was enough, helped entirely by Palace conceding late on against Charlton and Norwich being narrowly edged out 6-0 by Fulham. In truth it was one of the classic final days, with none of the relegation places being confirmed as the clubs’ 38th games kicked off. With Sheffield United already half into the Championship we won’t see a similar denouement this season but could this WBA team, quite clearly a stronger side than their forefathers 16 years ago, pull off a miracle. And make no mistake, it would be a miracle, given no Premier League team has ever been as many as eight points from safety with seven games or fewer left in a season and survived.
And yet… the mind’s eye keeps generating vivid images of a jubilant Big Sam on the Elland Road pitch on the final day, celebrating yet another survival. Allardyce went to Anfield at Christmas just days after Liverpool had won 7-0 at Palace and apparently all but ended the era of Jurgen Klopp’s champions functioning as a team. The thought of him getting what he needs against Marcelo Bielsa’s significantly different system is tantalising. The club’s underlying attacking and defensive performance, shown in the graph below is grim viewing for much of the season.
The relentless presence of the purple line above the red one is the data equivalent of being sent your Championship fixtures a year early. As autumn ended there was little sign the club would adapt to the top-flight this season, hence the introduction of Allardyce in December. And slowly but surely, through tried and tested coaching and a bit of January recruitment, Big Sam has got that red line creeping up and that purple line going down. There’s madness in his method but he’s done it before and he could, maybe, do it again.
It’s a huge long shot even after the last two games, with Stats Perform’s prediction model still giving West Brom a probability of only around 1-2% of hauling themselves out of the bottom three. Newcastle’s win at Burnley on Sunday was grim for both Allardyce’s team and Fulham, but seven remaining games (six for Fulham) is a potential 21 points. Win all of them and WBA would end on 45, as many as Arsenal have now and guaranteed safety. Five wins would give West Brom 39 and a very strong chance of survival. Four wins and a draw? Who knows. But we have drama and we have a relegation dogfight and even if you don’t support West Bromwich Albion we have Sam Allardyce applying his methods and getting traction. And in an unfamiliar, fast changing world, sometimes seeing something so deliciously familiar is possibly the greatest feeling of all.
