Twenty-two nationalities were represented at Ewood Park tonight when Blackburn Rovers played West Bromwich Albion in the Premier League--not something you'd expect to see everyday. Albion's gutless 0-2 surrender not only confirms their recent free-fall but leaves them with the joint-worst defence in the Premier League and, equally worryingly, only three points above the unforgiving abyss of the relegation zone.
What troubled me even more as a neutral, however, was how utterly alien their team-sheet looked like--Myhill, Jara, Tamas, Olsson, Cech, Mulumbu, Thomas, Scharner, Morrison, Odemwingie--a feeling not aided by a glance at the subs bench which featured Tchoyi, Pablo, Bednar and Zuiverloon. Perhaps I'm giving away my football viewing age here, but I remember a time when the fabulously named Canadian Paul Peschisolido was the only eyebrow-raising name you found on Albion's books.
Far from the paeans that this would invite regarding the 'growing international nature' of the 'best league in the world' from most people below a certain age group still naive enough to be enamoured by the Premier League, it revealed to me yet another instance of a rather disturbing trend I first caught on to when newly-promoted Leicester City signed a slew of Premier League has-beens in the summer of 2003. The logic, ostensibly, was to invest in 'proven quality' to minimise the quality gap long taken as a certain consequence of being pulled up into the top flight. To no one's surprise, Leicester went straight back down that season, having paid the ultimate, if somewhat delayed, price for switching from the unbelievably cool-sounding Filbert Street to the staid, prosaic-sounding Walkers Stadium. That, and the slightly more important lesson that putting your faith in endless numbers of foreign journeymen footballers without a back-up plan is the quickest way back to Championship football.
I see something very similar happening at West Brom. In the eleven seasons I have seriously watched Premier League football, West Brom have spent six either getting relegated from, or promoted to, the Premier League. The aforementioned Leicester, Birmingham, Sunderland and Derby have all been relegated twice each and, if this season's current standings hold, will be joined on that pedestal by both West Ham and Wolves. Other teams to have taken the drop in this period include Newcastle (who are back up to a position of respectability in the Prem), Watford, Norwich and Leeds (who are all seriously in contention for promotion next season, though my tip for the latter fulfilling that prediction is more instinct than logic).
But the mind boggles when you think of the others who have been there, done that and then vanished without a trace--whatever happened to Burnley, Portsmouth, Hull, Middlesborough, Reading and Charlton? Worse yet, who of today's Manchester United banner-waving, Arsenal-scarf wearing fans remembers Sheffield United, Southampton, Crystal Palace, Ipswich, Bradford and Coventry? Therein lies the problem of the unique creature known as the boing-boing club or, sadly, as is increasingly evident, the boing (down) club. But mired in the middle of all this were three clubs--Fulham, Blackburn and Bolton--who came up from the Championship in 2000-01 and are now on the cusp of something quite extraordinary.
One club I've left out of this depressing story are perhaps the new poster-boys for Premier League ambition--Manchester City. You'd hardly believe it to look at them now, but City were relegated in 2000-01, came straight back up in 2002-03 and are at very much the epicentre of the Premier League's glamour quotient today. But that glamour quotient has come at a price and I don't want to say money has bought City's league positions this season and last, but the fact is that their average league position between promotion in 2002-03 and takeover in 2009-10 was a hardly earth-shattering 11.57.
Living in relative and (crucially, to my mind) consistent poverty, Fulham have managed a comparable average league position of 12.57 over the same period, Bolton have done even better at 10.71 (finishing inside the top eight for four straight seasons, something City only managed in 2004-05, when Bolton were 6th) and Blackburn even better than that, having placed at 10.57 on average in that time (including two 6th-place finishes in 2002-03 and 2005-06, the first of which was the second-best finish by a promoted team in the Prem since Nottingham Forest finished 3rd in 1994-95).
Curiously, all three of these relatively modestly financed clubs haven't fallen victim to the second season syndrome either. Indeed, almost all other notable Premier League debut seasons have been submerged into insignificance by what has happened subsequently--Reading (8th in the league), West Ham (9th in the league and FA Cup finalists) and Wigan (10th in the league and League Cup finalists) today are instances of the kind of chronic decline best illustrated by the Ipswich class of 2001-02 whose appearances in the second round of the UEFA Cup against Slovan Liberec and the fourth round of the FA and League Cups came in the same extraordinary season that they managed to get themselves relegated.
And while Blackburn, Fulham and Bolton have also relied heavily on the 'proven foreigners' I so heavily chastised West Brom for doing just a while back, they've managed to combine it with a very simple three-step plan:
(a) Make the most of your novelty value in the first season;
(b) Accept the fact the most important signing you can make is probably the extension of your manager's
contract and
(c) Expect and be prepared for the inevitable relegation dogfight at some point during or after the first season (Fulham and Bolton have each finished 17th in their tenure in the Prem, while Blackburn have finished 15th thrice in six seasons since 2003-04).
It's no surprise to me, then, that the only other teams to have even approximated the Fulham/Bolton/Blackburn formula for sustained survival (and, almost by definition, relative success) ticked the most important of these boxes - Portsmouth [seven seasons under Harry Redknapp, discounting his (dis)honourable defection to Southampton in the middle, crowned by an 8th place and an FA Cup win
in May 2008] and Charlton (an equally--some would argue more--creditable seven seasons under Alan Curbishley, which started with a 9th place finish in 2000-01).
One may, perhaps somewhat prematurely, add to this list Stoke City (two drama-free mid-table finishes with points totals in the upper/mid-forties since August 2008) and, infinitely prematurely (based on a little more than the last season and a half under Steve Bruce), Sunderland, who, after surviving relegation by three points (2007-08) and two points (2008-09) respectively, reached the heady heights of 13th place, fourteen above the dropzone, last season and must be having a hard time restraining the hard-on of being a point off Chelsea in fourth and having already bettered their fourteen point gap to 17th with fifteen games to go, at the time of writing.
Let none of this late-night punditry distract, however, from my original point--at a time when it's rare enough for one decent team to get promoted to and survive in the Premier League, the increasing possibility of the Championship class of 2000-01 all surviving what would be ten straight seasons this May is an achievement as unique as it comes. And I'll be damned if this West Brom team hasn't been relegated from the Premier League come 2021.
What troubled me even more as a neutral, however, was how utterly alien their team-sheet looked like--Myhill, Jara, Tamas, Olsson, Cech, Mulumbu, Thomas, Scharner, Morrison, Odemwingie--a feeling not aided by a glance at the subs bench which featured Tchoyi, Pablo, Bednar and Zuiverloon. Perhaps I'm giving away my football viewing age here, but I remember a time when the fabulously named Canadian Paul Peschisolido was the only eyebrow-raising name you found on Albion's books.
Far from the paeans that this would invite regarding the 'growing international nature' of the 'best league in the world' from most people below a certain age group still naive enough to be enamoured by the Premier League, it revealed to me yet another instance of a rather disturbing trend I first caught on to when newly-promoted Leicester City signed a slew of Premier League has-beens in the summer of 2003. The logic, ostensibly, was to invest in 'proven quality' to minimise the quality gap long taken as a certain consequence of being pulled up into the top flight. To no one's surprise, Leicester went straight back down that season, having paid the ultimate, if somewhat delayed, price for switching from the unbelievably cool-sounding Filbert Street to the staid, prosaic-sounding Walkers Stadium. That, and the slightly more important lesson that putting your faith in endless numbers of foreign journeymen footballers without a back-up plan is the quickest way back to Championship football.
I see something very similar happening at West Brom. In the eleven seasons I have seriously watched Premier League football, West Brom have spent six either getting relegated from, or promoted to, the Premier League. The aforementioned Leicester, Birmingham, Sunderland and Derby have all been relegated twice each and, if this season's current standings hold, will be joined on that pedestal by both West Ham and Wolves. Other teams to have taken the drop in this period include Newcastle (who are back up to a position of respectability in the Prem), Watford, Norwich and Leeds (who are all seriously in contention for promotion next season, though my tip for the latter fulfilling that prediction is more instinct than logic).
But the mind boggles when you think of the others who have been there, done that and then vanished without a trace--whatever happened to Burnley, Portsmouth, Hull, Middlesborough, Reading and Charlton? Worse yet, who of today's Manchester United banner-waving, Arsenal-scarf wearing fans remembers Sheffield United, Southampton, Crystal Palace, Ipswich, Bradford and Coventry? Therein lies the problem of the unique creature known as the boing-boing club or, sadly, as is increasingly evident, the boing (down) club. But mired in the middle of all this were three clubs--Fulham, Blackburn and Bolton--who came up from the Championship in 2000-01 and are now on the cusp of something quite extraordinary.
One club I've left out of this depressing story are perhaps the new poster-boys for Premier League ambition--Manchester City. You'd hardly believe it to look at them now, but City were relegated in 2000-01, came straight back up in 2002-03 and are at very much the epicentre of the Premier League's glamour quotient today. But that glamour quotient has come at a price and I don't want to say money has bought City's league positions this season and last, but the fact is that their average league position between promotion in 2002-03 and takeover in 2009-10 was a hardly earth-shattering 11.57.
Living in relative and (crucially, to my mind) consistent poverty, Fulham have managed a comparable average league position of 12.57 over the same period, Bolton have done even better at 10.71 (finishing inside the top eight for four straight seasons, something City only managed in 2004-05, when Bolton were 6th) and Blackburn even better than that, having placed at 10.57 on average in that time (including two 6th-place finishes in 2002-03 and 2005-06, the first of which was the second-best finish by a promoted team in the Prem since Nottingham Forest finished 3rd in 1994-95).
Curiously, all three of these relatively modestly financed clubs haven't fallen victim to the second season syndrome either. Indeed, almost all other notable Premier League debut seasons have been submerged into insignificance by what has happened subsequently--Reading (8th in the league), West Ham (9th in the league and FA Cup finalists) and Wigan (10th in the league and League Cup finalists) today are instances of the kind of chronic decline best illustrated by the Ipswich class of 2001-02 whose appearances in the second round of the UEFA Cup against Slovan Liberec and the fourth round of the FA and League Cups came in the same extraordinary season that they managed to get themselves relegated.
And while Blackburn, Fulham and Bolton have also relied heavily on the 'proven foreigners' I so heavily chastised West Brom for doing just a while back, they've managed to combine it with a very simple three-step plan:
(a) Make the most of your novelty value in the first season;
(b) Accept the fact the most important signing you can make is probably the extension of your manager's
contract and
(c) Expect and be prepared for the inevitable relegation dogfight at some point during or after the first season (Fulham and Bolton have each finished 17th in their tenure in the Prem, while Blackburn have finished 15th thrice in six seasons since 2003-04).
It's no surprise to me, then, that the only other teams to have even approximated the Fulham/Bolton/Blackburn formula for sustained survival (and, almost by definition, relative success) ticked the most important of these boxes - Portsmouth [seven seasons under Harry Redknapp, discounting his (dis)honourable defection to Southampton in the middle, crowned by an 8th place and an FA Cup win
in May 2008] and Charlton (an equally--some would argue more--creditable seven seasons under Alan Curbishley, which started with a 9th place finish in 2000-01).
One may, perhaps somewhat prematurely, add to this list Stoke City (two drama-free mid-table finishes with points totals in the upper/mid-forties since August 2008) and, infinitely prematurely (based on a little more than the last season and a half under Steve Bruce), Sunderland, who, after surviving relegation by three points (2007-08) and two points (2008-09) respectively, reached the heady heights of 13th place, fourteen above the dropzone, last season and must be having a hard time restraining the hard-on of being a point off Chelsea in fourth and having already bettered their fourteen point gap to 17th with fifteen games to go, at the time of writing.
Let none of this late-night punditry distract, however, from my original point--at a time when it's rare enough for one decent team to get promoted to and survive in the Premier League, the increasing possibility of the Championship class of 2000-01 all surviving what would be ten straight seasons this May is an achievement as unique as it comes. And I'll be damned if this West Brom team hasn't been relegated from the Premier League come 2021.
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