New West Brom boss sees visit of second-placed Middlesbrough as 'perfect start'
New boss Eric Ramsay insists he would be happy to select a tough starter like Middlesbrough at home as Albion boss.
Ramsay will lead the Baggies for the first time as the Championship's second-placed side visit The Hawthorns on Friday night.
The new head coach described facing Boro as the "perfect start" due to the nature of the test for his players and sense of occasion under the lights in a television fixture.
Asked of facing a tricky start, Ramsay said: "In some senses (yes), but I feel like it's, in a lot of senses, a perfect start. It's a real challenge.
"It's one that the players know full well that they will need to hit really high levels of performance if we're going to be competitive in that game.
"And all the messages so far have been around that. In a lot of senses, it would be something I would handpick. A big club at home, under the lights on a Friday night with a real sense of optimism and the players have a real point to prove."
Ramsay started working with his Albion squad on Tuesday with just a couple of days' preparation ahead of facing the Teessiders.
Boro, under the guidance of new boss Kim Hellberg, are second and six points adrift of Coventry having returned to winning ways in the league with a 4-0 rout of Southampton.
Hellberg's side had gone winless in four, a sequence in which they failed to score, but the Swede had previously made a positive start to life at the Riverside having succeeded Wolves' Rob Edwards.
Ramsay said of his preparation: "You'd always want more time as a coach, but I feel the time we've had we've used well and I will endeavour to really strike that balance between enough information and enough of what I want and what we want as a staff, but not too much.
"I think there's a really fine balance to be struck there, and I think so far we've stayed on the right side of the line, and ultimately we can do what we can do in the time that we've got.
"I feel good about where we are at the moment based upon the work we've done, but I know that doesn't necessarily amount to anything come Friday, but we have used the time as well as we possibly could have done."
