Game of the Day
It seems everytime the West Brom players walk onto the pitch, be it home or away fans of all teams are writing them off, saying that they will lose, but here we have a team ready to repeat their amazing survival of the 2004-05 season, whereby the Baggies were bottom of the Premier League table at Christmas, under the former Manchester United captain and former Albion player Bryan Robson and managed to avoid the drop on the last day of the season after beating Portsmouth, whilst elsewhere results went their way, with Manchester United beating Southampton to guide Soton to the Championship.
This season the Baggies have lacked a goal scoring talent and when faced with talented attackers like Afonso Alves and Tuncay, you would expect them to crumble under pressure from these two strikers, however Albion managed to prevent those threats producing goals and instead produced 3 goals to stun their opposition, 1 from Chris Brunt and 2 from Robert Koren althoughthe first of Koren’s goals is disputed between Koren and debutant Marc-Antoine Fortune as after a one-two between Koren and Fortune, Koren’s shot appeared to deflect off of Fortune to take it beyond Ross Turnball, the Boro shotstoper.
This victory now ensures that until tomorrow the Baggies will not be bottom, as they climbed above Tottenham Hostpur, who will host fellow strugglers Portsmouth who travel to White Hart Lane with not only the prospect of playing against former player Jermain Defoe and former manager Harry Redknapp, but also bringing Sol Campbell back to play against one of his former sides in Tottenham. If Tottenham manage to avoid defeat tomorrow they will climb above Albion but it will still leave the battle to avoid relegation close with around 10 teams battling to avoid the drop into the Coca Cola Championship.
To those that have consistantly written off the Baggies, do you still believe they will definitely go down? Having known what the Baggies can achieve, and what they have in previous seasons, I believe that with the closeness of the bottom half of the table, that the Baggies have a very realistic chance of avoiding the drop, as they did in the 2004-05 season. They have shown today that they can convert the chances into goals, and if they can go on a run of good form, they can climb up that table quicker than you can say “relegation”. Just like the Premier League Title race, the race to avoid relegation is far from over, and there are likely to be many twists and turns before the final whistle on the final day of the season.
