It wasn’t all bad for Ryan Mason at the Hawthorns, although specifically at the Hawthorns given West Bromwich Albion’s away record. He took 10 points from his first four Championship matches. The underlying numbers were pretty good, if you ignore things like points and league position.
At a freezing cold King Power on Monday night, Mason’s brand of misfortune reached its peak: near-total dominance, squandered chances and a cruel late goal via an outrageous finish. The irony: Mason was sacked after one of West Brom’s best performances of the season.
As ever in the EFL, patience exhausts as you drop closer to the dreaded dotted line. Relegation had become a greater possibility than promotion, even via the play-offs. West Brom haven’t lost 11 straight away league games since 1927 and Mason leaves on 10 and out. Eight of them were by a single goal; the fine margins apply paper cuts until you can’t stop the bleeding.
Perhaps the Championship is simply a mighty difficult environment for newbies and first-timers. As with Will Still (and now Tonda Eckert) at Southampton, Joe Edwards at Millwall, Tom Cleverley at Watford, Alan Sheehan at Swansea City and so many others, the difficulty lies not in instilling your playing style but persuading players and supporters that the style deserves faith when results turn. The experts are able to rid negative momentum quickly.
It has been a rotten 13 months for West Brom, then separated from the top six on goals scored. Carlos Corberan chose to leave for Valencia, with Chris Brunt overseeing a subpar caretaker spell. Tony Mowbray returned but only lasted 18 matches; James Morrison completed the season.
Mason was the longer-term, braver retort to Mowbray’s supposed familiarity. But it was also a gamble for a club that still had ambitions of promotion. Mason was 34, had no permanent managerial experience and none at all in the EFL. The gamble has not paid off and the deteriorating form persuaded the club that the extended faith – that Mason was always likely to need – had no basis in reality. They got scared because the situation was getting scary.
He was also dealt a rough hand, and not just by misfortune. West Brom don’t have parachute payments or Premier League revenue anymore. The club is also paying for the transfer mistakes of previous years, parsimony forced by PSR limits. The sale of three key players in the summer was necessary to balance those books, but West Brom failed to replace Tom Fellows, their most creative outlet.
Some money was spent to bolster the squad but, other than Aune Heggebo, it all seemed a little dreary and functional. Krystian Bielik and Alfie Gilchrist, who both arrived for fees over £1m, have struggled for starts through injury, form and suspension.
If this is a case of wait and watch until the pursestrings can be loosened a little with another messy financial year off the profit and sustainability books, that is a tricky sell to supporters who follow this club home and away.
All of the necessary measures you must take – reduce the size of the squad, the age of the squad and the cost of the squad – can simultaneously be labelled as positive steps whilst also doing little to inspire fevered excitement when it produces reduced output too.
For all that Mason’s exit has been met with near-universal acceptance, every failed appointment asks serious questions of those above. Removing the perceived problem and people rightly start seeking out others: recruitment, planning, leadership.
West Brom’s next appointment is now crucial and without an obvious solution. They surely cannot repeat the trick of an inexperienced outsider, but neither can they expect to sell perfunctory football easily. They tried Mr Dependable a year ago and that went terribly too.
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The word that West Brom and so many others are trying to avoid here is “drift”.
This club has not finished in the bottom half of the second tier since the turn of the century and now they might.
West Brom were a Premier League club and then a yo-yo club and then a Championship club. It becomes far harder to shift up through those steps than to fall into a new, less appetising reality. Ask Watford, Stoke, Hull, Derby, Swansea, Blackburn, Norwich all about that.
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