Comment: A season of what-ifs so far, with West Brom still in flux
As we arrive at the end of the regular season, thoughts naturally turn to the campaign as a whole.
Win tomorrow and the Baggies will beat the points tally that won them the Championship title 11 years ago under Tony Mowbray.
After years of grinding their way to safety in the Premier League, Albion have scored the best part of 90 goals this season and won 23 games so far. At times, it has been refreshingly fun.
If you had offered supporters a top four finish at the start of the season, the majority would have snapped your hand off after the disaster of the last campaign in the Premier League.
Albion have navigated relegation more successfully than Stoke, who can’t finish higher than 16th, or Swansea, who won’t finish higher than ninth.
And yet there remains an uncomfortable air of frustration around The Hawthorns this season, because this has been a campaign of ‘what ifs’.
Albion may be guaranteed fourth place, but it is the manner of the journey getting there that suggests this team has not reached its full potential.
Adding the likes of Harvey Barnes, Dwight Gayle, and Mason Holgate to a Premier League squad should have been enough to win promotion. It may still.
But it is the uncertainty clouding the future of the club that has put pressure on going up, and sucked some of the joy out of what should have been, on paper, a raucous promotion push.
Albion are currently a club in flux. They do not know what division they will be in next season, they do not know who their manager will be, and there are question marks surrounding the owner.
Guochuan Lai shows no sign of investing the sort of funds Championship clubs need to be competitive, and time is running out each year as Premier League parachute payments dwindle.
This season, as many fans are keenly aware, is Albion’s best chance of going back up.
Even if life in the Championship is far more fun and unpredictable than the top tier, the financial disparity between those two divisions coupled with Albion’s own uncertainty at the top makes the situation desperate.
That desperation is why Darren Moore lost his job in March.
Everyone was aching for Moore to succeed, but the uncomfortable truth is subsequent results under a more pragmatic approach adopted by caretaker Jimmy Shan appear to justify what looked – at the time – to be a brutal sacking.
The next decision is the big one though. Regardless of how well Shan has done and how much he’s exceeded expectations, Albion are in desperate need of a some fresh ideas this summer.
Michael Appleton has joined Shan’s backroom staff for the play-offs, and there will be some fans keen for the club to consider him or former club captain Derek McInnes in the summer.
Those two managers may not be bad appointments, and could end up in The Hawthorns dugout in years to come.
But the next appointment has to be something fresh and exciting, an outside influence to reinvigorate a club in need of a rebuild, regardless of which division it’s in.
When Moore was sacked, the board couldn’t find the right man for the many separate jobs required.
Replacing a rookie manager with a rookie manager was always destined to be received poorly, but Albion do appear to have turned a corner under Shan.
However, the decision-makers have now had enough time to make contingency plans for the summer, and that puts pressure on the next appointment.
Albion need to reset themselves, whatever happens in the play-offs.
Because a season finishing in the top four with nearly 90 goals to celebrate shouldn’t feel this frustrating.
