Express & Star

Ally Robertson: A final push with it all on the line for West Brom – I can’t watch!

We fought back against Norwich to give ourselves a chance – I’m so glad we don’t have to go to Swansea with nothing on the line.

Published

Final day matches without anything to play for mean nothing – but this could mean everything.

I’ve got everything crossed Carlos Corberan and the boys can go to South Wales with the maximum determination that we need to win our game, regardless of scores elsewhere.

I missed the Norwich game and it now seems like the team win every match I don’t watch!

I’m not making the trip so I’ll be at the pub and every five minutes I’ll look at my phone to check the scores, probably like many Baggies worldwide on Monday.

The one thing I’ll always say is to focus on us.

It was the same in our day when we won promotion under Johnny Giles, we had to win to go up and that’s all we bothered with – forget how Bolton were doing elsewhere.

Anything can happen. Five teams are going for two places. But we need to win. If we win and still don’t go up at least we did our bit on the day and finish on a good note.

If somehow everything falls into line and results go our way, it would give us unbelievable momentum if we did make it into the play-offs.

I’m still a little bit disappointed we were unable to get either of those two wins at home, against Sunderland or QPR. We’d done the hard work away, got over our winless away run by beating Stoke and Blackpool, but have dropped points at The Hawthorns and if we hadn’t we would have been in the top six at this point. So that is a shame.

But, to be fair, from where we were earlier in the season to still have a shot on the final day is good work from the head coach and the team.

Performances have been up and down of late. We’ve had some good performances, like against Norwich, but there have also been games we’ve started off ever so well, like Sunderland, but just been unable to sustain it and fallen away.

In a way I feel sad for the fans because we’ve been in a position to do it – but just not got there. How different the picture would look with one more win!

Of course, we’ve had all those injuries, the team changes, when you get to the end of a season and you need those points, you have got to have a steady side. Dara O’Shea and now Daryl Dike have had bad injuries, the midfielders have too.

Taking a step back and thinking where we were when Carlos took over in October and where we are now, it’s a quite brilliant effort.

You’ve got to hold your hands up and give him respect for lifting the team. I wanted to reserve a word for club captain Jake Livermore who is going to leave the club this summer. It was nice that he had that send-off against the Canaries.

He’s not played as much as he’d have wanted of late but what he has done for the club otherwise over more than six years has been very good. He will be difficult to replace with the character he has.

Jake was an important personality behind the scenes and in the dressing room, you need that at a club. You don’t see that sort of longevity at clubs too much in this day and age.