West Brom’s Strange History Makes Tony Pulis’ the Impossible Job

On a mild day in September 2000, West Bromwich Albion welcomed Crystal Palace to the West Midlands in the old Football League Division One.

It was, nominally, a day of celebration. But sitting in the thinly populated Birmingham Road End, watching the shallow breeze tickle the corner flags before kick-off as a man in a giant throstle costume kicked balls into an empty goal, there was little to mark the occasion out as anything other than another inconsequential game at the bottom end of England’s second tier between two sides whose ambition had seemingly dried up.

The afternoon marked 100 years since West Brom moved to the Hawthorns from their former home at Stoney Lane, but in spite of the club’s best efforts, it was difficult for anybody inside the ground to summon much of a mood of celebration.

There was a low-key ceremony on the pitch before the game, and the match-day programme made allusions here and there to the previous century of ups and downs, but through the muted pageantry, a heavy sense of inertia penetrated, comfortingly familiar to those of us on the terraces that day.

It isn’t easy now, from the relatively lofty position of mid-table in the Premier League, to muster much of a sense of what it was like to follow the Albion back in the first year of the new millennium. There hadn’t been top-flight football at the Hawthorns since 1984; a barren spell by the standards of one of the Football League’s founding members, one that had brought with it the indignity of a spell in the third tier.

There was the fear that comes when any formerly great club finds itself excluded for long enough from the elite, that what started out as a temporary blip in fortunes might, in fact, be turning into the new norm.

The new Premier League had been formed, and its clubs were dividing up the new TV riches of top-level football among themselves, winning new global audiences to go with their increased exposure. Aston Villa had come within a few points of winning the inaugural Premier League title. Even Birmingham City had tasted victory at Wembley in the Auto Windscreens Shield final, and nobody on this side of the city centre had been excited about football for decades.

All of this contributes to a strange collective uncertainty around West Brom as 2017 prepares to break. This is a place with a complex and idiosyncratic past where identity has been more fluid than for almost any other club; first they were big, then they were nowhere, and now nobody seems able …

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